Leaked Supreme Court Memos Reveal the Shadow Docket's Extremely Stupid (and Corrupt) Origins
Opening Arguments
Opening Arguments Media LLC
4.3 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 22 April 2026
⏱️ 92 minutes
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Summary
VR29 - Thomas, Lydia, and Matt go deep on the “Shadow Papers,” the 2016 shadow docket memos recently leaked to The New York Times which reveal the truth about the deliberations preceding the first time of many times to come that the Supreme Court stopped the government from enforcing something before any court had a chance to rule on it. Can anyone still possibly believe that John Roberts is only there to call “balls and strikes” after seeing how enthusiastically he is pitching for the energy lobby in these documents? Why are these glorified work emails so important, and what can we learn about the current state of SCOTUS from them?
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Chief Justice John Roberts’s confirmation hearing (Sep. 12, 2005)
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“Read the Supreme Court’s Shadow Papers,” The New York Times (April 18, 2026)
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West Virginia v. EPA, 597 US ___ (2022)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to opening arguments. |
| 0:11.2 | This is VAPID Response Wednesday, and do we have the VAPID for you today? |
| 0:16.1 | I'm Thomas. |
| 0:16.7 | That over there's Real Life Attorney, Matt Cameron. |
| 0:18.1 | How are you doing, Matt? |
| 0:18.9 | Oh, I'm great. |
| 0:19.6 | I can't wait to dig into John Roberts' emails, I guess. They're memos, but close enough. |
| 0:25.2 | This is actually super important. This is one of the most important things. It's happened in the law in years, really. Yep. Yep. And Lydia, how you doing? Hi, I'm doing okay. I'm here and I'm excited. You know, actually I hadn't read the New York Times |
| 0:40.0 | article about the stuff we're going to be talking about. So this is going to be fresh for me. |
| 0:43.7 | And I'm really excited to get into it and learn what's going on. We're going to be talking all about |
| 0:48.1 | the memos that were leaked, I guess, the New York Times from about 10 years ago. The start of |
| 0:54.0 | ruining everything. Okay, that's a years ago. The start of ruining everything. |
| 0:55.3 | Okay, that's a big claim. The start of ruining something. The Supreme Court's legitimacy, |
| 0:59.8 | I guess I'll say. On the X and Y axis of ruining everything, this is a, this is definitely a major... |
| 1:05.7 | Ah, Matt's doing math. Don't go. Hold on. I just hurt myself a little bit as describing a chart. Oh, boy. In Access. Yeah, I know. This is really important because this is how, I mean, if this is a movie, it would be called Shadow Docket Origins. This is where it came from. Yeah. This is the prequel or episode one or whatever. Shadow Docket Origins is a pretty good name. |
| 1:27.8 | It is pretty good. Yeah, I like that. Or the Shadow Docket could be like a villain. Yes. Oh, interesting. Sounds like a Grisham novel already. It is a villain. Yeah. Not even the Kevin Gresham novel. Sounds like a genre. Yeah. That's pretty much, I mean, we're going to, we got an amuz douche. We still having a moose douche for you |
| 1:44.8 | because Matt always brings the fun with that. |
| 1:47.1 | Dintage. |
| 1:47.6 | But we, we've got to talk all about this. That's going to take up the whole vapid response because there's that much vapid in these memos, which you're not going to believe, folks. I'm sure you've read this, but we're going to dig in more than just the New York Times article. we're going to actually dig through the memos that they released with that on the side. |
| 2:04.3 | And they're probably worse than you would think or worse than the average person would think. |
| 2:09.7 | I think we can really... |
| 2:10.5 | Yeah, I think one thing we can offer and with math's expertise here is like digging into really how much worse this is than probably |
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