The Supreme Court Shows Its Work

I n Dave Chappelle’s classic “Black Bush” sketch from 2004, the president (played by Chappelle) is asked whether his only interest in sending American troops to the Middle East is oil. Looking incredulous, Black Bush replies to the female reporter, “Who said somethin’ about oil, b****, you cookin’?” and then knocks over a pitcher of water and sprints out of the room.

This is typically the level of transparency we receive from the executive branch in 2026. Questions are ridiculed and deflected, blame is shifted, and the public can’t figure out how decisions are being made. Ask the current president why, for instance, he continues to apply — and then change — tariffs on foreign goods, he will shrug and say, “I can do what I want.”

Members of Congress are equally squirrelly when asked what they are up to. They dodge and obfuscate, pretending they know nothing about the president’s latest comments or hadn’t heard anything about the biggest news in the country. They hide behind voice votes, so there is no record of whether they said yea or nay to a piece of legislation or an executive nomination.

And when both the president and Congress feel like dodging an issue, they will shovel it over to an executive agency, where bureaucrats will hash out the details in secret. Blue-ribbon study commissions will be formed, with their findings released during the Super Bowl and buried on a department website that is viewed less often than the Kid Rock sex tape.

Meanwhile, the branch everyone (particularly progressives) loves to call secretive — the Supreme Court — is actually the most transparent institution in Washington. The Supremes are the last word on all the legal bric-a-brac the legislative and executive branches try to hide. And the tariff ruling handed down last Friday proves that they refuse to duck the smoke.

When the Court’s 6–3 majority struck down the president’s sweeping tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, it did not simply say no and adjourn for an afternoon of pickleball. Chief Justice Roberts wrote a full majority opinion explaining exactly why the IEEPA does not hand the president unlimited authority to impose tariffs of any size, on any country, for any duration he chooses. He cited prior cases, walked through the statutory text word by word, and laid out Congress’s Article I power to set trade policy. You can disagree with every sentence, but you cannot accuse the man of hiding his work.

That is how every Supreme Court decision works. Nine unelected lawyers in black robes are the only people in Washington constitutionally required to explain themselves in writing. Every ruling carries a majority opinion that must lay out the legal reasoning in enough detail to be cited, challenged, and built on for decades. Dissents are published alongside the majority, meaning the losing side airs its objections in the same document, for all of history to read.

Yet the Supreme Court is routinely derided as being insulated from the voters.

When Justice Gorsuch, himself part of the majority, wanted to scold his colleagues for applying the major questions doctrine in one way to President Donald Trump and another to President Joe Biden, he wrote a 46-page concurrence saying exactly that — a published legal brief with his name on it.

This is the Court’s defining feature: public proceedings and written opinions. Oral arguments are open to anyone who shows up. Transcripts are posted the same day. The justices’ prior rulings form a paper trail stretching back centuries, against which every new decision can be measured. “We teach that we are judged by what we write,” Justice Anthony Kennedy once told a congressional subcommittee — a standard of accountability that neither of the two branches before whom he was testifying has ever seriously attempted to meet.

Consider the contrast. When the president imposed his tariffs, the administration offered essentially no public reasoning beyond bleating the word “emergency.” When Trump changed rates on various countries — sometimes by dozens of percentage points within a single news cycle — the public rationale was whatever happened to be said at the lectern that morning.

The Supreme Court has its own transparency problems, to be sure. The shadow docket — where justices make significant rulings on compressed timelines with abbreviated briefing and sometimes no written rationale — has grown substantially in recent years. When the Court allowed several of the administration’s agency firings to proceed without a full written opinion, it was behaving, for a moment, like the very branches it regularly outperforms.

But the shadow docket is the exception. On its main docket, the Court remains a model of enforced accountability. And here is what separates it most sharply from the other two branches: the Court cannot simply declare victory and move on. When the Senate confirms a nominee or when the president signs an executive order, neither institution is required to justify the decision in any permanent, reviewable, public document. The Court has no such escape hatch. Every exercise of its power generates a written record, immediately published, permanently available, and subject to debate and criticism.

Over a century and a half ago, Abraham Lincoln recognized the role of written judicial opinions in setting precedents. In a speech on the famous Dred Scott decision, Lincoln noted that “judicial decisions have two uses — first, to absolutely determine the case decided, and secondly, to indicate to the public how other similar cases will be decided when they arise.”

It is a strange irony of American political life that the branch we trust least — appointed, not elected; tenured for life; answerable to no constituency — is the one most structurally compelled to show its work. The branches we trust most to represent us operate in a fog of deliberate vagueness, where the goal is never to say anything clearly enough that it can be held against you later.

Perhaps that is the real lesson of the tariff ruling. The president lost not only because his legal theory was wrong but because the Supreme Court is one of the few remaining entities in Washington that must explain, in writing, to everyone, the nature of the error. If the other two branches were held to the same standard, they might think twice before knocking over the pitcher and sprinting out of the room.