SENATE PANEL TO EXAMINE SUPREME COURT’S ABORTION RULING

A Senate panel has set its sights on the Supreme Court’s increasingly common practice of deciding weighty cases on an emergency basis, a procedure the justices used this week to greenlight Texas’s severe curtailment of abortion access.

Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.), the Senate Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat, announced Friday that the committee would hold a hearing on the court’s so-called shadow docket, which often produces consequential rulings without the justices having received a comprehensive set of paper briefs or hearing oral arguments.

The court recently used the truncated process to rule on significant disputes over immigration policy and federal eviction protections and, more recently, to leave intact a new Texas law that bans most abortions in the country’s second-most populous state.

What he said: “The Supreme Court must operate with the highest regard for judicial integrity in order to earn the public’s trust,” Durbin said in a statement. “This anti-choice law is a devastating blow to Americans’ constitutional rights — and the Court allowed it to see the light of day without public deliberation or transparency.”

“At a time when public confidence in government institutions has greatly eroded, we must examine not just the constitutional impact of allowing the Texas law to take effect,” he continued, “but also the conservative Court’s abuse of the shadow docket.”