It doesn't seem like anyone else is noting this, but it is a really bad sign when federal appeals courts are treating the decisions of the Supreme Court's emergency "shadow docket" as if they are Supreme Court precedent.
A federal appeals court on Tuesday allowed teams affiliated with the Department of Government Efficiency to gain access to potentially sensitive data on millions of Americans, overruling a lower court that had blocked that access in February.
By a 2-to-1 vote, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit granted the access to data stored at the Treasury Department, the Education Department and the Office of Personnel Management, citing the Supreme Court’s decision in a similar case in June involving Social Security data.
...
Writing for the majority, Judge Richardson said the circumstances of the case mirrored those in a lawsuit involving data that the Supreme Court had weighed as an emergency application this year. In an unsigned order in that case, the Supreme Court intervened to allow the DOGE analysts to continue sifting through the records “in order for those members to do their work.”
Shadow docket decisions that are made without full briefing of the issue and without any oral argument. There also is no decision explaining the Court's reasoning for the decision and often those decisions don't even indicate how each justice voted on the issue. They are supposed to be minor procedural rulings that only apply in that specific case. The fact that the current Supreme Court has started using a mechanism designed to make technical procedural rulings to effectively make policy is bad enough. It's even worse if other courts treat them as binding precedent.
