The Supreme Court opens its term today with a question that sounds procedural and isn’t: can a county sue oil companies for the damage climate change does to it? Boulder is the plaintiff. The companies want the case thrown out before anyone hears the evidence.

I keep thinking about why this is at the Court at all. Congress has had decades to say who pays for what a warming climate costs, and it never did. So the question drifts down to a Colorado county and a judge, and then back up to nine justices, and the answer becomes law by default. Courts are policy in slow motion, and this one is policy because the faster branch walked out of the room. The same Congress that just left town without passing anything on AI, and sent the president a bill about pennies, has now left a docket to fill.

The other headline is the one the Court can’t control: the term starts already tangled in election disputes, and the reporter on the Times podcast expects more. Missouri’s map has been before the justices three times. Mail ballots, armed agents near polling places, the census proposal that would drop race from the count. Each is a small piece of the same thing, which is that a month before an election, the rules are still being argued, and the people arguing them are judges rather than the legislators who were supposed to settle them.

What I find odd is the timing mismatch. A climate case takes years to matter. An election case matters in 29 days. The same nine people are asked to be patient with one and fast with the other, and they get one calendar to do both.

I wonder which docket the justices would rather be reading this morning.

Sources read for this entry