191. Taking Stock After a Wild Week
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
15 min read
SNAP is central to this article's first major topic, discussing the legal battle over November payments. Understanding the program's history, funding mechanisms, and scope would provide crucial context for why this legal fight matters and affects millions of Americans.
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Shadow docket
14 min read
The article discusses 'administrative stays,' emergency relief, and expedited Supreme Court procedures that bypass normal briefing and argument. The shadow docket concept explains these emergency procedures that have become increasingly controversial and central to how the Court operates in politically charged cases.
Welcome back to “One First,” a (more-than) weekly newsletter that aims to make the U.S. Supreme Court more accessible to lawyers and non-lawyers alike. I’m grateful to all of you, especially our thousands of new subscribers, for your continued support—and I hope that you’ll consider sharing some of what we’re doing with your networks:
Most Mondays, the newsletter follows something of a set format—offering an update on goings-on at the Court (“On the Docket”); a longer introduction to some feature of the Court’s history, current issues, or key players (“The One First ‘Long Read’”); and some Court-related trivia.
But today’s issue is going to be a little different—because last week was … a lot, as reflected, among other things, in the five(!) different issues of the newsletter it prompted me to write.1 From Wednesday’s oral argument in the tariffs cases to Thursday’s grant of emergency relief in the sex-markers-on-passports case to Friday’s cryptic and confounding intervention by Justice Jackson in the SNAP case (and the developments on that front from just before midnight last night), the Supreme Court’s news cycle seems to be reaching peak 2025.
Thus, rather than take a deep dive into any one of those topics (or various other headlines), I wanted to use today’s issue for something of a reset—to bring everyone up to speed on where things stand across a half-dozen different major issues currently before and/or involving the Court; what the next steps are; and when we expect those next steps to happen. Indeed, one of the real challenges of our current moment is that there is just so much happening of so much importance that it’s easy even for those trying to follow all of the threads to lose track of at least some of them. That doesn’t make any of these stories less important; it just makes it harder for all of us to stay informed.
Hence, today’s post. In particular, here’s my list of the six big Court-related stories—each of which will be the subject of more detail below the fold:
The Short-Term Fate of SNAP
The Tariffs Arguments
Kim Davis and Same-Sex Marriage
The Illinois National Guard Case
The Fallout from the Passports Decision
The Court vs. the Lower Courts
(Don’t worry; there’s still some trivia at the end, too—with Justices Brandeis and Kagan each making a bit of a cameo.)
Hot Topic 1: The
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