'Team effort': How liberal SCOTUS justices are 'coordinating' their scathing dissents

05 July 2024

During a late May appearance at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Justice Sonia Sotomayor spoke candidly about how terrible she considers some U.S. Supreme Court rulings of the 2020s to be.

The Barack Obama appointee told the crowd, "There are days that I've come to my office after an announcement of a case and closed my door and cried. There have been those days. And there are likely to be more."

A month later, Sotomayor was a dissenter in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo—which, on June 28, found the Court's GOP-appointed supermajority overturning 1984's landmark Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. ruling after 40 years and ending what has been known as "Chevron deference."

The Chevron standard said that courts should defer to experts at federal regulatory agencies, and critics of the Loper Bright decision have been warning that the High Court's ruling will endanger Americans' access to clean air and water.

In an article published by NBC News on July 5, journalists Lawrence Hurley and Gary Grumbach described the vehement dissents that the Court's three Democrat-appointed justices — Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — have been offering recently.

Hurley and Grumbach report, "Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor appeared visibly perturbed as she complained last week about a Supreme Court ruling that curbed the powers of the Securities and Exchange Commission…. The ruling was one of three delivered in the final week of the Court's term that cast blows against the powers of federal agencies."

The reporters continue, "All were decided 6-3 on ideological lines, with the Court's conservatives in the majority. And in all three, the liberal justices did their utmost to draw attention to their broader concerns about the Court's chipping away at the powers of federal agencies to issue regulations in areas such as the environment, worker safety and consumer protection. In fact, they took turns."

Attorney Sam Sankar, who represents the environmental group Earthjustice, speculates that Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson are working as a "team" with their dissents.

Sankar told NBC News, "The dissents didn't splinter. They focused their energy. My guess is they collaborated. My sense is this was a team effort."

Read NBC News' full report at this link.

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