Without providing any clue how they got their hands on 16 internal Supreme Court memos, the New York Times posits that almost a week’s worth of the justices’ correspondence, from February 5th to the 9th, 2016, changed the Shadow Docket forever.

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.

The initial memo from the Chambers of the Chief Justice was surprisingly fraught given the general view of John Roberts as the keeper of the Court’s institutional legitimacy. Contrary to popular belief, the chief justice has only limited authority to assign decisions within the majority, and is otherwise just one vote on a court of nine. He’s not in charge of the other justices, and his say doesn’t carry any greater weight than anyone else’s.

But in his memo of February 5, CJ Roberts rang the alarm of impending catastrophe if the Court didn’t act immediately. Or impetuously, according to your perspective.

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.

The issue came to the Court as an emergency application for a stay, premised on Obama’s use of the Clean Air Act of 1970 to impose a fundamental regulatory shift by the EPA away from coal to clean energy. What distinguishes this use of the shadow docket wasn’t that the Court was presented with an emergency application. That happened from time to time, most notably when a defendant was about to be executed while a cert petition was pending. If the defendant prevailed, not even SCOTUS can bring him back from the dead if the death penalty proceeded in the interim.

What made this strikingly unusual was the case was with still sub judice in the D.C. Circuit. In other words, it put SCOTUS in the position of undermining the circuit before it had the opportunity to reach its decision. From CJ Roberts’ perspective, it reflected an attempt by the Obama administration to circumvent the Supreme Court by forcing energy companies to make plans and expend substantial fund to comply with the new EPA regulations before the Court had a chance to say no. And as far as CJ Roberts was concerned, the answer was going to be no, even though it was still a long way from being briefed or argued before the Court.

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.

And then something unusual for the time happened, although it will strike most as mundane nowadays.

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.

What this meant to Roberts was that by the time the case came before the Supreme Court in the ordinary manner, it would be too late to matter as the change had become a fait accompli. Bureaucrats like McCabe, or presidents for that matter, didn’t take to the media to tell the Court that it was irrelevant.

And so, despite resistance from the four Democrat-appointed justices, and in the last vote given by Justice Antonin Scalia before his death on February 13th, by a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court leap-frogged the circuit and stayed the EPA regulations.

Regardless of whether you think the outcome was correct, and without any real intention of making turning the Shadow Docket, rulings without reasoning, into a major part of the Supreme Court’s role in the scheme of American jurisprudence, the Court broke from its tradition of letting its “inferior” courts hear and decide cases before inserting itself into controversies and, essentially, cutting off lower courts at the knees.

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.

Over the course of my career as a lawyer, I’ve come to appreciate the virtue of institutional stability, without which we can’t know how to conduct ourselves and whether today’s lawful action is tomorrow’s crime, or vice versa. As applied to the Supreme Court, it’s important to realize that the justices don’t possess magical powers to know better than all other judges what’s constitutional and what’s not.

We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final.

–Justice Robert H. Jackson, Brown v. Allen (1953)

These days, after hundreds of judges have ruled on issues of gross presidential excess, the unexplained and inexplicable rulings of the Supreme Court majority have too often rendered the judicial process irrelevant and, in contrast to the Court’s taking impetuous action to stop Obama from circumventing a paralyzed Congress, has empowered Trump to create fundamental and potentially irreparable changes in our constitutional structure by issuing voluminous Executive Orders, dropping “excursionary” bombs, or just demolishing the East Wing when the mood strikes.

The tradition of the Supreme Court not stepping on the decisions of lower courts before a case came before it in the usual course might have been slow and, at times, inadequate, but it had the virtues of stability and clarity. There was a process and we knew how it worked. Now, what stopped Obama is enabling Trump, and we have no clue what will be allowed tomorrow and what will cease to exist should Trump decide it doesn’t serve his interests. This is not a good thing for the Court or the Country, and that’s why I’ve become a reluctant traditionalist.