Law

Question: When the government tells a court that a board weighed a four-year phased renovation against a two-year closure, what happens if the board never saw the comparison? Answer: It withdraws it. On Wednesday, October 21, the Justice Department filed a notice of errata in the Kennedy Center case conceding that portions of three sentences in its pending motion “mistakenly describe” the JLL plan, that the comparison of a two-year closure with “an alternative four-year project with phased, partial closures” and the $41 million construction-cost figure drawn from it came from “an alternate version of the report provided to the Center on August 20, 2026, which was not provided to the Board,” and that the report the Board had was 160 pages, not 180. “Defendants regret these errors.” Filed the same day, Representative Joyce Beatty’s reply in support of her motion to compel says the government produced that August report for the first time on Monday, October 19, after the depositions had ended, and that it shows a phased renovation was feasible. Discovery closed Friday. ...

Question: When a plaintiff tells a court that a privilege has never been properly invoked, what does the government do next? Answer: It invokes it. On October 14, Joshua T. Hoyt, a Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Counsel to the President, filed a declaration in the Kennedy Center case stating that “at the direction of the President” he was “formally invoking the presidential communications privilege” over what Representative Joyce Beatty has sought in discovery. The same afternoon, Judge Christopher Cooper issued the scheduling order the parties had spent a week arguing about: Beatty’s opposition to the motion to lift the injunction is due October 30, the government’s reply November 6, and briefing on summary judgment is stayed until the court rules on the motion to lift. Discovery closes October 23. In the Epstein files case, the government spent the week arguing that no administrative record is needed, and on Friday morning it hand-delivered a binder of redacted interview notes that the court had asked for twice. In the third docket, the D.C. Circuit let the stay motion sit, now eighteen days past the last brief. ...

Question: When the government asks two courts to decide a case on the record it has chosen, what happens if both courts answer that the record is not finished? Answer: They order more. On October 9, Judge Christopher Cooper refused to close discovery in the Kennedy Center case, extended it two weeks to October 23, and directed the Board to produce three things it had resisted: the FY 2026 financial statements, the text messages, and any non-privileged document showing that the Chairman’s February 1 announcement affected the votes the Board cast in August and September. The same day, Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the Justice Department to produce the underlying handwritten FBI interview notes it had declined to furnish in redacted form, by noon on October 16. Two days earlier, Cooper ordered the unsealing of the 163-page JLL Plan on which the Board relies to justify the closure. And in the third docket, the D.C. Circuit, where the government wants both questions settled for good, let its October 9 dispositive-motions deadline pass with nothing filed and its stay motion still undecided eleven days after the last brief landed. ...

Question: What does a disclosure statute mean if the government can ask a court to decide the case before any record of its compliance exists? Answer: This week it asked two courts to do exactly that, and it asked the second one not to look at all. On October 1 the Justice Department moved for judgment on the pleadings in Phang v. Blanche, the Epstein files case before Judge Emmet Sullivan, and in a companion motion asked the court to postpone the certified list of the administrative record that was due that same day. Two days earlier, in the consolidated appeal of the same case, it told the D.C. Circuit that the Epstein Files Transparency Act’s scheme “precludes judicial review” of Phang’s claims. In the third docket, the Kennedy Center case, Representative Beatty told Judge Christopher Cooper that the record the government did produce was assembled to defeat review, and she used the phrase the court itself had used in May: “a stacked deck of discovery”. ...

The Supreme Court was designed to be the least dangerous branch. Alexander Hamilton called it that in Federalist 78, and for most of American history the description held: the Court had no army, no purse, and no way to enforce its own decrees. Its only real power was the willingness of the country to obey it. That willingness is now in question, and the numbers are not subtle. In July 2026, Gallup measured Supreme Court job approval at 33 percent, the lowest in the 26-year history of the trend, with disapproval at a record 61 percent (Jones, 2026). The Marquette Law School Poll, which tracks the Court continuously, found 47 percent approval and 53 percent disapproval in late July, below 50 percent for the ninth consecutive survey (Franklin, 2026). The same poll found that 58 percent of Americans now believe the justices are motivated mainly by politics rather than law, up six points in a single quarter (Franklin, 2026). A majority, 54 percent, say the Court is going out of its way to avoid ruling against President Trump (Franklin, 2026). ...