Ethiopia's fuel crisis deepens as war on Iran drives up prices

 

Israel’s VILEST Crime Yet - The Evidence Is Overwhelming - YouTube

 

Israel’s VILEST Crime Yet - The Evidence Is Overwhelming - YouTube

 

Trump Administration Approves Firing Squad Executions for Death Penalty

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“The Trump administration announced it will allow firing squads and reauthorize lethal injection for federal executions, reversing the Biden administration’s moratorium on capital punishment. The Justice Department’s report also suggests expanding the types of crimes eligible for the death penalty and shortening the appeals process. However, the federal government can only conduct executions in states that allow capital punishment, posing a logistical challenge.

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The Justice Department also reauthorized the use of a death penalty drug, and will seek to shorten the length of some legal appeals.

April 24, 2026

The Justice Department has reauthorized the use of pentobarbital in executions of federal inmates and will also allow the use of firing squads and “additional methods of execution.”Eric Lee for The New York Times

The Trump administration said on Friday that it would allow firing squads and readopt lethal injection as part of a broader push to revive the death penalty.

In an accompanying report, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, said that decisions by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to pull back on capital punishment “inflicted untold damage on victims of crime, and, ultimately, to the rule of law itself.”

The Justice Department, he said, had reauthorized the use of pentobarbital to execute federal inmates and would also permit additional methods of execution, like the use of firing squads.

The 48-page report added that the Bureau of Prisons should follow the example of states that had expanded their execution protocols amid fights over the legality and availability of lethal injection drugs.

“The additional manners of execution that B.O.P. should consider adopting include the firing squad, electrocution and lethal gas — each of which the Supreme Court has found to be consistent with the Eighth Amendment,” the report said, referring to the part of the Bill of Rights that bars “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, called the moves “a stain on our nation’s history.”

Mr. Durbin accused the Justice Department of “turning back the clock by strengthening the barbaric practice of the federal death penalty — a cruel, immoral and often discriminatory form of punishment.”

President Trump had signaled the moves on his first day in office, signing an executive order to reinstitute capital punishment in the federal prison system. During the first Trump presidency, 13 people were executed on federal death row.

In 2021, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland issued a moratorium on executions of federal inmates and halted the use of a lethal drug protocol using pentobarbital. In his final days in office, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. commuted the death sentences of 37 of the 40 convicted killers on federal death row.

The Trump administration faces one significant hurdle. Under the law, the federal government may only conduct executions in states that allow capital punishment and carry them out according to state protocols.

For years, federal executions have taken place in Indiana, which only allows for capital punishment by lethal injection.

The Justice Department, acknowledging that limitation in its report, recommends the federal government find a new location to conduct executions, in a state that allows other methods. Mississippi, the report states, allows executions by electrocution, or firing squad if lethal injection or other methods are not available.

The report called for the Bureau of Prisons to submit a report “detailing the options to relocate or expand federal death row, or to construct a second federal execution facility in a state that permits additional manners of execution.”

The firing squad has rarely been used in the United States, but has recently been authorized by several states as an alternative method if the states cannot procure lethal injection drugs. Before last year, the only firing squad executions in the country in modern times had been carried out by Utah, in 1977, 1996 and 2010, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a research group.

But in 2025, South Carolina, which had authorized the firing squad in 2021, executed three prisoners using the method.

In its Friday announcement, the administration said it was working on a regulation intended to cut years off the federal appeals process for state death penalty cases, though ultimately the courts have final say.

The department also said it planned to issue a regulation that would impose new limits on the ability of inmates sentenced to death to seek clemency or pardons from the federal government.

The report also suggested expanding the types of crimes, and the types of criminals, eligible for the federal death penalty in order to “correct gaps and deficiencies” in the current law. Congress would have to pass any such change into law.

The administration should consider proposing legislation, the report said, that would make eligible for the death penalty “murders of law enforcement officers; murders by aliens illegally in the United States; and murders constituted or committed in the commission of hate crimes, stalking, material support, or domestic violence.”

Much of the report centered on creating a new legal and regulatory framework to preserve the availability of the drug most often used to conduct executions.

Robin M. Maher, the director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said the report seemed more focused on grievances with the Biden administration than a straightforward analysis of lethal injection protocol.

“It struck me as rather disingenuous in terms of reflecting the reality of the problems” with the use of pentobarbital in executions, Ms. Maher said.

Pentobarbital was first used in an execution in 2010, in Oklahoma, and soon became a common method by which to execute prisoners.

As with other drugs used in lethal injections, it faced legal challenges from prisoners and their lawyers, who said that it caused prisoners to suffer, but courts have allowed its use, and several states use it as their primary method. Still, some states have had trouble obtaining the drug because of pressure from medical and advocacy groups on drugmakers.

In January 2025, the Justice Department under Mr. Garland issued a memosaying that “there remains significant uncertainty about whether the use of pentobarbital as a single-drug lethal injection causes unnecessary pain and suffering.” The department wrote that federal authorities should not use the drug for executions until its effect was more clear.

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs reports on stories across the United States, including natural disasters, protests, unsolved mysteries, high-profile criminal cases and more.“

 

Trump Reposts Tirade Against Chinese and Indian Immigrants

(Trump is and always has been an ignorant racist.)

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“President Trump reposted a transcript from a right-wing podcast on Truth Social, in which the host referred to China and India as “hellhole” places and criticized recent immigrants from those countries. The post sparked backlash from the Indian government, Asian American advocacy groups, and Democratic lawmakers, who condemned the xenophobic rhetoric. The incident comes amid ongoing debates about immigration, including Trump’s efforts to end birthright citizenship and changes to the H-1B visa program.

​

The president touched off a furor with his post sharing a podcast episode in which the host referred to China and India as “hellhole” places.

April 23, 2026

U.S. Immigration Crackdown

President Trump posted the transcript on his Truth Social account on Wednesday night.Kenny Holston/The New York Times

By Amy Qin

Amy Qin is a national correspondent covering Asian Americans. She reported from Washington.

President Trump provoked a broad backlash this week when he posted a transcript from a right-wing podcast in which the host referred to China and India as “hellhole” places and said recent immigrants from those countries had not “integrated” into America as “European Americans” had.

The transcript, which Mr. Trump posted on his Truth Social account on Wednesday night, came from a recent episode of “The Savage Nation,” hosted by Michael Savage, a popular conservative talk radio host. Mr. Trump also posted the original video clip of Mr. Savage’s podcast.

The president did not add any commentary to his posts, but across Asia and the United States, many people saw an unwelcome message that demanded a response.

In a rare public rebuke of the White House, the Indian government took to X to criticize the comments, calling them “obviously uninformed, inappropriate and in poor taste” without explicitly naming Mr. Trump.

Asian American advocacy groups and some Democratic lawmakers faulted Mr. Trump for amplifying xenophobic rhetoric at a time when the administration’s efforts to restrict even legal immigration have left many Indian Americans and Chinese Americans worried about their place in American society.

“We are deeply disturbed by @POTUS sharing this hateful, racist screed targeting Indian and Chinese Americans,” said the Hindu American Foundation, a group that has been critical of both Democrats and Republicans, in a statement on X. “Endorsing such rants as the president of the United States will further stoke hatred and endanger our communities, at a time when xenophobia and racism are already at an all time high.”

The Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Mr. Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, are scheduled to meet for a summit in Beijing in mid-May.

The podcast excerpt shared by Mr. Trump was recorded shortly after the Supreme Court hearing on Mr. Trump’s executive order seeking to ban birthright citizenship, which confers citizenship on nearly all children born on U.S. soil and has long been seen as a fundamental tenet of American identity and law.

In the clip, Mr. Savage claimed, without evidence, that recent immigrants had “almost no loyalty” to America; that the nation was being “overrun with Chinese coming here just to drop a baby on our shores to then bring in the entire family”; and that Indians and Chinese had set up “internal mechanisms” so that only people from their countries could get tech jobs in California.

“A baby here becomes an instant citizen, and then they bring the entire family in from China or India or some other hellhole on the planet,” Mr. Savage said.

“They’re not like the European Americans of today and their ancestors,” he added.

Mr. Trump’s post comes as the Supreme Court weighs the constitutionality of his executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship for babies born to undocumented people and to some temporary foreign visitors. Mr. Trump has made rolling back birthright citizenship central to his campaign to expel millions of immigrants from the United States. He even attended the oral arguments at the Supreme Court where, to his dismay, some of the conservative justices appeared skeptical of the president’s position.

Earlier on Wednesday, before he posted the podcast transcript, Mr. Trump had said in a separate Truth Social post that “certain” conservative justices on the Supreme Court had “gone weak, stupid, and bad.” He mentioned the birthright citizenship case, which the court is expected to decide this summer.

On Thursday, a spokesman for the White House, Kush Desai, defended Mr. Trump’s post of the transcript, saying that the president was “calling out the scam of unfettered birthright citizenship.”

In recent years, Asians have been the fastest-growing group in the country, and people from India and China have accounted for the bulk of that increase. In 2023, Asians made up about 7 percent of the national population. By some measures, immigrants from India and China and their descendants have been among the most successful groups in the United States, with high levels of education and income.

But as the Trump administration has sought to limit most immigration pathways, both groups have also come under increasing scrutiny. The administration’s changes to the H-1B program, a skilled worker visa that is especially popular among Indians, have fueled racist rhetoric targeting the Indian community across the country.

The president’s push to end birthright citizenship has also spurred more debate over birth tourism, a term that refers to pregnant women who travel to the United States to give birth so that their baby can have American citizenship. It is most commonly associated with a cottage industry of “maternity hotels” that has emerged over the past two decades and caters to wealthy families from countries like China.

The phenomenon of birth tourism is not believed to be widespread. In its most recent estimate in 2020, the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that supports restricting immigration, put the number at around 20,000 to 26,000 babies a year — less than 1 percent of the number of babies born in the country. Nonetheless, birth tourism has become a frequent talking point for conservatives seeking to eliminate birthright citizenship for all.

Some Democratic lawmakers also criticized Mr. Trump for sharing the podcast transcript.

Representative Grace Meng, a Taiwanese American Democrat from New York and chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, said in a statement that she was “disgusted” by the post.

“At a time when hate incidents against South Asian communities are surging, and one in four Americans view Chinese Americans as a threat,” she said, “amplifying this kind of bigotry pours fuel on an already dangerous fire and must be unequivocally condemned.”

Representative Ami Bera, an Indian American Democrat from California, described Mr. Trump’s comments in a post on X as “offensive, ignorant, and beneath the dignity of the office he holds.”

Mr. Desai, the White House spokesman, is Indian American. He said the president’s relationship with the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, was evidence of his support for people from India. “Everyone besides the failing legacy media knows that President Trump has a strong friendship with Prime Minister Modi and loves patriotic Indian Americans who were an important bloc in the historic coalition that fueled his landslide 2024 election victory,” he said.

Other prominent figures in the Trump administration of Indian or Chinese descent include Harmeet K. Dhillon, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for civil rights; Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director; Steven Cheung, the White House communications director; and Usha Vance, the wife of Vice President JD Vance.

Asked at a Turning Point USA event in Georgia last week about the H-1B visa program, Mr. Vance referred to his own in-laws to argue that while naturalized citizens should prioritize American interests over those of their ancestral country, many immigrants had also brought value to America.

“Look, I am married to the daughter of immigrants from India,” Mr. Vance said. “And I love my in-laws, and they’re great people and they’ve been great contributors to the United States of America.”

Amy Qin is a national correspondent for The Times, writing primarily about Asian American communities.“

 

Live Updates: Investigators Search for Motive in Shooting at Washington Dinner

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“President Trump was unharmed after a gunman, identified as Cole Tomas Allen, opened fire at the White House Correspondents’ dinner. The suspect, who exchanged gunfire with authorities, was apprehended before reaching the ballroom. This marks the third time in three years that President Trump has faced danger from a gunman.

​

President Trump was unharmed after being rushed from the stage at the White House correspondents’ dinner. A gunman exchanged fire with authorities but did not reach the ballroom, and a suspect was in custody.

Updated 

April 26, 2026, 7:24 a.m. ET9 minutes ago

Trump Safe After Shooting at White House Correspondents’ Dinner

President Trump was at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner at a Washington hotel when gunfire broke out. Mr. Trump was unharmed.Salwan Georges for The New York Times

Pinned

Investigators were working on Sunday to determine a motive in the shooting that sent Secret Service agents rushing President Trump from the stage at the White House correspondents’ dinner, an attack that raised questions about how a gunman was able to get close to one of Washington’s most heavily guarded events.

The suspect, identified by two law enforcement officials speaking on condition of anonymity as Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, Calif., was taken into custody after running through a security checkpoint and exchanging gunfire with the authorities inside the Washington Hilton on Saturday night. Officials said he did not reach the ballroom, where Mr. Trump, top administration officials and hundreds of journalists had gathered.

World leaders condemned political violence after the shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner on Saturday, the third in three years to unfold close to President Trump.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan said he was “relieved” to know that Mr. Trump and other attendees were safe.

Federal authorities surrounded the Los Angeles-area home of the suspect in the attack at the White House correspondents’ dinner late Saturday, as police vehicles with flashing red and blue lights blocked the street.

It was not clear if the authorities had entered the home, in Torrance, Calif. Shortly after midnight Pacific Time, the agents moved out as a convoy of armored vehicles — with agents wearing F.B.I. insignia hanging off the sides — rolled past a crowd of residents and news media crews.

The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, held to celebrate press freedom, quickly descended into panic on Saturday evening when a man carrying multiple weapons charged past a security checkpoint at the Washington Hilton and exchanged fire with law enforcement officials before being taken into custody.

President Trump, attending the dinner for the first time in either of his terms, said he heard a loud noise toward the back of the ballroom before a Secret Service agent shouted “Shots fired.” Agents rushed to the president and escorted him and the first lady out.

A gathering of journalists at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum came to a halt around 8:45 p.m. Saturday, moments after guests learned of gunfire at the Washington Hilton, where the White House correspondents’ dinner was being held.

The party, hosted by Substack a little more than a mile from the hotel, had been billed as an “alternative” to the annual dinner.

It was 10:31 p.m. on Saturday when President Trump walked into the White House briefing room, still dressed in his tuxedo and bow tie, to talk about what may have been yet another attempt on his life.

“Well, thank you very much,” he said. “That was very unexpected!”

Once again, a gunman got perilously close to President Trump.

The storming of a security checkpoint on Saturday evening by an armed man at the hotel hosting the White House Correspondents' Association dinner was the third time in three years that Mr. Trump had faced danger. During the 2024 campaign, he survived two assassination attempts, including a bullet grazing his ear in Butler, Pa.

The spring pea and burrata appetizer course had been distributed and the schmoozing hour of Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner had begun when a small commotion occurred toward the back of the Washington Hilton ballroom shortly past 8:30 p.m.

It might have been an upturned catering cart, or perhaps a scuffle with protesters. Then security officers began sprinting down the aisles toward the elevated dais, where President Trump, along with Vice President JD Vance and the first lady, Melania Trump, had taken their seats just a few minutes earlier.

A California man was in custody in connection with the shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner on Saturday night at the Washington Hilton, President Trump said during a news conference Saturday night.

The man in custody has not been identified publicly by the authorities, but two law enforcement officials familiar with the investigation said that he is Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, Calif. The officials asked to remain anonymous because they had not been authorized to disclose the information.

Shortly after the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner began on Saturday around 8 p.m., a gunman was confronted and tackled by law enforcement officers near a security checkpoint of the Washington Hilton.

A security video posted online by President Trump showed the man running past a security checkpoint, with a swarm of law enforcement officials in pursuit. The man taken into custody was Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, Calif., according to multiple law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose the information.“

BOMBSHELL report exposes how Supreme Court EMPOWERS Trump agenda through shadow docket rulings

 

“The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court

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The New York Times obtained secret memos revealing the origins of the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket,” a practice of making major decisions without the usual procedures. In 2016, the court, led by Chief Justice Roberts, blocked President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, marking a significant shift in its operations. The memos show a clash between Obama’s desire to address climate change and Roberts’s concern over executive power, highlighting the contentious nature of the decision.

​

April 18, 2026

The birth of the Supreme Court’s shadow docket has long been a mystery.

Secret memos obtained by The New York Times illuminate the origins of the court’s now-routine “shadow docket” rulings on presidential power.

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Just after 6 p.m. on a February evening in 2016, the Supreme Court issued a cryptic, one paragraph ruling that sent both climate policy and the court itself spinning in new directions.

For two centuries, the court had generally handled major cases at a stately pace that encouraged care and deliberation, relying on written briefs, oral arguments and in-person discussions. The justices composed detailed opinions that explained their thinking to the public and rendered judgment only after other courts had weighed in.

But this time, the justices were sprinting to block a major presidential initiative. By a 5-to-4 vote along partisan lines, the order halted President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, his signature environmental policy. They acted before any other court had addressed the plan’s lawfulness. The decision consisted of only legal boilerplate, without a word of reasoning.

At the time, the ruling seemed like a curious one-off. But that single paragraph turned out to be a sharp and lasting break. That night marks the birth, manylegal experts believe, of the court’s modern “shadow docket,” the secretive track that the Supreme Court has since used to make many major decisions, including granting President Trump more than 20 key victories on issues from immigration to agency power.

Since that night a decade ago, the logic behind the Supreme Court’s pivotal 2016 order has remained a mystery. Why did a majority of the justices bypass time-tested procedures and opt for a new way of doing business?

The answer would remain secret for generations, legal experts predicted. “We’ll never know (at least, until our grandkids can read the justices’ internal papers from that time period),” Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown, wrote in a newsletter in February marking the anniversary of the order.

The New York Times has obtained those papers and is now publishing them, bringing the origins of the Supreme Court’s shadow docket into the light.

The 16 pages of memos, exchanged in a five-day dash, provide an extraordinarily rare window into the court, showing how the justices talk to one another outside of public view.

Writing on formal letterhead, but addressing one another by their first names and signing off with their initials, they sound notes of irritation, air grievances and plead for more time. In addition to the usual legal materials, they cite a blog post and, twice, a television interview. They sometimes engage with one another’s arguments. But they often simply talk past each other.

In public, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has cultivated a reputation for care and caution. The papers reveal a different side of him. At a critical moment for the country and the court, the papers show, he acted as a bulldozer in pushing to stop Mr. Obama’s plan to address the global climate crisis.

When colleagues warned the chief justice that he was proposing an unprecedented move, he was dismissive. “I recognize that the posture of this stay request is not typical,” he wrote. But he argued that the Obama plan, which aimed to regulate coal-fired plants, was “the most expensive regulation ever imposed on the power sector,” and too big, costly and consequential for the court not to act immediately.

In the Trump era, he and the other conservative justices have repeatedly empowered the president through their shadow docket rulings. By contrast, the papers reveal a court wielding those same powers to block Mr. Obama. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. warned that if the court failed to stop the president, its own “institutional legitimacy” would be threatened.

The court’s liberals pushed back, but compared with their recent slashing dissents, they were not especially forceful, mostly confining their arguments to procedures and timing.

The papers expose what critics have called the weakness at the heart of the shadow docket: an absence of the kind of rigorous debate that the justices devote to their normal cases.

After obtaining the papers, The Times confirmed their authenticity with several people familiar with the deliberations and shared them with a spokeswoman for the court. The Times posed detailed questions to the justices who wrote the memos; they did not respond.

Sign up for the Docket newsletter.  Adam Liptak helps you make sense of legal developments in a turbulent time.

Since that breakneck February 2016 exchange, the emergency docket has swelled into a major part of the court’s business, as the justices have short-circuited the deliberations of lower courts. The decisions are technically temporary, but are often hugely consequential.

Rulings with no explanation or reasoning, like the sparse paragraph from that February night, have become routine. The emergency docket is now a central legacy of the court led by Chief Justice Roberts.

Read a decade later, the memos suggest that none of the justices fully appreciated what they were doing: embarking on a questionable new way of operating.

A Constitutional Collision

A coal-fired power plant in Lawrenceburg, Ind., in 2016. At the end of 2015, President Barack Obama was trying to put his signature environmental policy, the Clean Power Plan, into effect.Ty Wright for The New York Times

The 2016 case was a collision between the principles and personalities of Mr. Obama and Chief Justice Roberts.

The president was under enormous pressure to address the global climate crisis. He had campaigned on that promise, then for eight years as the planet heated, he failed to get major environmental legislation through Congress. With his term about to end, this was his last chance to act.

The chief justice was eager to assert his institution’s authority and to rein in Mr. Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency, which he believed had sidestepped a recent ruling.

The two men, both cerebral, polished Harvard Law graduates, had long posed a puzzle: How could such smooth personalities create so much friction?

Mr. Obama had been one of just 22 senators to vote against Chief Justice Roberts’s confirmation in 2005, saying that the nominee had “far more often used his formidable skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak.” Four years later, the two men managed to botch the simple task of reciting the presidential oath at Mr. Obama’s first inauguration.

True, Chief Justice Roberts had cast the decisive vote in 2012 to save the centerpiece of the Affordable Care Act, Mr. Obama’s signature legislative achievement. But that was approved by Congress.

After Republicans won control of Congress, Mr. Obama responded by pushing the boundaries of presidential authority, promising that his administration would act on pressing problems “with or without Congress.” He tightened gun regulations and granted deportation relief to millions of undocumented immigrants.

The chief justice and some of his colleagues were watching warily, concerned the president was going past what the Constitution allowed him to do on his own. In a 2014 opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the court warned Mr. Obama that he needed to tread carefully in setting environmental policy without congressional approval.

That statement was one of the early articulations of what would come to be known as the major questions doctrine, saying that on important matters, executive branch agencies could act only with clear direction from Congress.

Then, in June 2015, the court ruled against the Obama administration in a case involving mercury emissions. The next day, an E.P.A. official, Janet McCabe, made what now looks like a tactical error. She issued a statement that, according to the papers, offended the chief justice and struck him as an attempt to sideline the court.

She asserted that the court’s ruling had come too late to matter.

“The majority of power plants are already in compliance or well on their way to compliance,” Ms. McCabe wrote on the agency’s website.

In a recent interview, Ms. McCabe said she had not meant “to be disrespectful of the Supreme Court or the judicial system” and was merely stating a legal reality. Indeed, over more than three years of litigation, no court had stayed the mercury regulation and power plants had already taken major steps to conform.

With the clock ticking down on Mr. Obama’s presidency and the global Paris climate accords looming, the White House tried to craft a signature piece of environment legislation that could survive the court’s scrutiny.

In October 2015, the E.P.A. issued Mr. Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which aimed to shift the power sector from reliance on coal to natural gas, wind and solar. The goal was an “aggressive transformation in the domestic energy industry,” according to a White House fact sheet.

Its legal basis was open to question. The agency said it was authorized by a seldom-used provision of an old law, the Clean Air Act of 1970. Critics responded that it was unlikely that Congress would have authorized a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s power supply in such an obscure provision.

When more than two dozen states, along with business groups, quickly sued to stop the program, Obama administration lawyers readied for an extended fight, they said in recent interviews. The case was surely going to wind its way to the Supreme Court eventually, and given the tension between the conservative justices and the Obama administration, they knew it might not survive.

The challenge to the regulation went straight to the D.C. Circuit, which set it down for a prompt argument, but refused to halt the plan in the meantime. At that point the challengers, led by West Virginia, tried to take a shortcut. Instead of waiting for the appeals court to hear the case, they went straight to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to pause the plan for the duration of the litigation, including an eventual possible return trip to the Supreme Court.

Both sides agreed that it was an unusual request.

“This had never been done,” Elbert Lin, who was West Virginia’s solicitor general, acknowledged in an interview.

At the Justice Department, lawyers involved with the case said they were not terribly worried. To be sure, the court sometimes granted emergency applications from death row inmates and in fast-moving election disputes. But the court had never intervened on an emergency basis to shut down a major presidential initiative.

“In football parlance,” said Avi S. Garbow, the E.P.A.’s general counsel at the time, “we would call it a Hail Mary.”

A Five-Day Sprint

West Virginia’s emergency request landed with Chief Justice Roberts on Jan. 26, 2016, just as the Supreme Court was scattering into vacation mode for an annual midwinter break.

Justice Clarence Thomas retreated to Florida to teach a law school class. Justice Stephen G. Breyer delivered a lecture in Paris. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave a talk in Italy billed as a conversation with “the Notorious RBG.” Justice Antonin Scalia sped through Asia, where he promoted a book, met with the prime minister of Singapore and schmoozed with local lawyers over drinks at a rooftop bar.

In the meantime, Chief Justice Roberts worked speedily, ordering the Obama administration to respond in just eight days.

To better understand what happened next, The Times spoke to 10 people, liberals and conservatives, who were familiar with the deliberations over the pivotal emergency order and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because confidentiality was a condition of their employment.

At the court, word was passing among the clerks, who serve as brokers among the nine chambers: Some of the conservative justices were taking the long-shot application seriously.

It was initially hard to tell how the vote would fall, people familiar with the discussions said. The Supreme Court felt less predictable back then, more alive with debate. The court was technically divided 5 to 4 between justices appointed by Republicans and Democrats, but Justice Kennedy, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, was a true swing vote, “a persuadable person,” as one of those people put it. The term before, he had written the majority opinionto establish a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

On Feb. 5, the internal correspondence obtained by The Times shows, the chief justice circulated a blast of a memo, insisting that the court halt the president’s plan.

His arguments were forceful, quick, and filled with confident predictions. The court was going to give the case a full hearing eventually, he forecast. At that point, the justices would vote to overturn the Obama plan, he said, because it went beyond the boundaries of the Clean Air Act.

For now, the chief justice contended that the court had to act immediately because the energy industry “must make changes to business plans today.”

“Absent a stay, the Clean Power Plan will cause (and is causing) substantial and irreversible reordering of the domestic power sector before this court has an opportunity to review its legality,” he wrote.

In his final paragraph, the chief justice again told colleagues that the E.P.A. had done an end run around the court with the mercury regulation just months before and said the agency had signaled that it was planning to do the same thing again.

The chief justice cited an unusual source for that last point, one that would not ordinarily figure in a Supreme Court opinion: an interview with the BBC in which the E.P.A. administrator at the time, Gina McCarthy, had said “we are baking” the Clean Power Plan “into the system.”

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“The comments of the E.P.A. administrator herself indicate that without immediate action from this court, this rule will become functionally irreversible.”

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

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In the memo, he weighed no potential downsides of his proposal and considered no alternatives.

Justice Breyer responded later that day to the chief’s memo but did not address all its points. Such stays were unusual, he wrote, stating his objections mildly.

He skipped over the question of whether the plan was lawful, asking only: Why the rush? The circuit court had already set a date to hear the case in June. The first deadline for power plants to reduce their emissions was six years away; full compliance was not required until 2030. That was plenty of time for the case to play out through the legal system.

The chief wrote right back the next day sounding irritated and blunt.

Speed was vital, he said, because environmental regulation was going to be very expensive for states and the power industry. The sums involved could approach $480 billion, he asserted, and industry groups would have to start preparations immediately.

“Without a stay of the E.P.A.’s rule, both the states and private industry will suffer irreparable harm from a rule that is — in my view — highly unlikely to survive,” he wrote. He was predicting the ultimate outcome of a case that had barely begun to be litigated.

Seeing how little headway Justice Breyer had made, Justice Elena Kagan sounded an alarm. In a memo on Feb. 7, she warned the chief justice that he was departing from the court’s long-established way of doing business.

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“The unique nature of the relief sought in these applications gives me real pause.”

Justice Elena Kagan

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Court action at this point in the process would be “unprecedented,” she added. She mentioned that she was inclined to find that the Obama plan was lawful, but she said the thin briefing made it difficult for her “to determine with any confidence which side is ultimately likely to prevail.”

Justice Alito issued a salvo on the same day as Justice Kagan, with neither of them addressing the other. Echoing the chief justice’s sense of insult and suspicion about the Obama administration, he wrote that the E.P.A. appeared to be trying to render the court irrelevant.

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“A failure to stay this rule threatens to render our ability to provide meaningful judicial review — and by extension, our institutional legitimacy — a nullity.”

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.

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The chief justice and Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito wanted to halt the Obama plan, according to people familiar with the deliberations. Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan were opposed. (It is not clear whether Justices Scalia, Thomas or Ginsburg set out their reasons in writing.)

As usual, the decision would come down to Justice Kennedy.

On Feb. 9, he dashed off a quick, three-sentence note. He believed that the Supreme Court would ultimately stay the Clean Power Plan soon anyway, and that there was no reason to put off the inevitable. He was voting with the chief justice.

Over just five days, the justices had decided the issue. Even as they debated the Obama plan’s possible burden on the power industry, in the entire chain of correspondence obtained by The Times, not a single justice, conservative or liberal, mentioned the dangers of a warming planet as one of the possible harms the court should consider.

At 6:20 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 9, the court alerted the public to its decision, releasing the cryptic one-paragraph order.

To the public, the White House tried to downplay the speed and starkness of its loss, calling it merely “a bump in the road” on a call with reporters. But behind closed doors, officials were astonished that the court had intervened so quickly, they said later. Mr. Garbow, the E.P.A.’s general counsel, was meeting with Ms. McCarthy about the water crisis in Flint, Mich., when the order landed. An aide interrupted, handing him a note that he said he read with “utter shock and surprise.”

These days, justices who disagree with emergency orders often protest in vigorous written dissents. In 2016, the four liberal justices merely noted they had voted against the order. Although their private memos included extended arguments against the majority’s approach, they said nothing more in public.

In the moment, the case looked like an outlier, not a turn toward a new way of operating, according to people involved. Nor did it look like a final decision on climate policy. Hillary Clinton was the strong favorite to win the presidency later that year. With her election, the court would be poised to take a step to the left.

Then, just four days after the court’s decision, many of the certainties, projections and assumptions that the justices had made in those rushed memos started to collapse.

The New Normal

The following Saturday morning, Justice Scalia failed to appear for breakfast at a weekend hunting retreat in Texas. Hours later he was found dead. As far as the public record reveals, the vote on the Clean Power Plan was his last. Had the court not acted with exceptional speed, the case would have ended in a deadlock and the Obama plan would have stayed in place.

But not for long. With Mr. Trump’s election that November, the plan was doomed as a practical matter.

In the end, the legacy of those five days was more about the transformation of the court than it was about the fate of the Obama effort to confront climate change.

The litigation continued but became a ghost ship of a case after Mr. Trump replaced it with his own regulation. In 2022, this time following normal procedures, the Supreme Court concluded that the Clean Air Act did not authorize the E.P.A. to issue sweeping regulations across the power sector to address climate change.

Since then, even as the court’s approval ratings dropped, applications like the one it confronted a decade ago have proliferated, swamping the court’s ordinary work.

This is partly a consequence of a gridlocked Congress and presidents willing to push the boundaries of executive power, particularly Mr. Trump.

But it is also the result of the justices’ decision to entertain emergency requests like the one in 2016, warping procedures that had developed over centuries.

In an appearance this month at the University of Alabama, Justice Sonia Sotomayor reflected on the unceasing flood of emergency applications.

“We’ve done it to ourselves,” she said.

1. 

   Jodi Kantor

   Reporter, Investigations

   Adam and I have spent many weeks anticipating your reactions to these memos, which allow us to hear what the justices sound like in private. What struck you most about the justices' private conversation?

2. Thank you to the NY Times for this reporting. I'm a retired lawyer and have taught Constitutional Law classes. I am outraged that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court allowed a decision in a case based on what the EPA director said in a TV interview (!) without reading the record from the lower court, without reading any briefs, without oral argument and without any significant discussion with the other Justices. Add to it the blatant partisanship of of giving Trump a presumption that his actions are are presumed legal yet failing to apply the same principal to Obama's actions. And add to that Robert's own amateur cost-benefit analysis that sealed the deal. The US is desperately in of a substantial SCOTUS reform to replace Roberts and his conservative kangaroos.

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Julie Tate contributed research. Ann E. Marimow contributed reporting.

Produced by Jenni Lee, Matt Ruby and Tina Zhou.

A correction was made on 

April 19, 2026

: 

An earlier version of this article mischaracterized in one reference a measure the Environmental Protection Agency issued in October 2015. It was a regulation, not legislation.

Jodi Kantor is an investigative reporter currently focused on the Supreme Court. Her work has spurred cultural and legal shifts in the United States and across the globe.

Adam Liptak is the chief legal affairs correspondent of The Times and the host of The Docket, a newsletter on legal developments. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times in 2002.“