They’re already enshrined to the nation’s highest bench, but the Supreme Court’s conservative justices are clearly putting themselves on a pedestal—and are ready to rumble with any lower federal courts that they feel are getting too big for their britches—or robes. The fact that the justices feel the need to express their superiority is surprising given that, by definition, the lower courts must defer to them—they get to sit on a court literally called the Supreme Court, after all. But even more surprising is that the lower courts seem ready to fight back.
Take Justice Samuel Alito’s harsh words in the March 2025 USAID judgment that allowed the agency to release nearly $2 billion dollars in foreign aid funds that Trump sought to block. Alito dissented from that majority decision, which he wrote left him “stunned,” but saved his best bile for the lower court. In a strikingly-personal insult, he called the district court’s decision “self-aggrandizement,” seemingly just because the judge had dared disagree with Alito’s view that Trump’s presidential power is nearly unlimited.
The irony of a Supreme Court justice accusing a lower court of being self-aggrandizing seems lost on Alito’s conservative colleagues as Justice Neil Gorsuch (joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh) soon expanded the criticism to address the whole of the lower federal judiciary. In a shadow docket decision allowing Trump to cancel nearly $800 million in research grants to the National Institutes of Health, Gorsuch offered a pointed smackdown: “Lower court judges may sometimes disagree with this court’s decisions, but they are never free to defy them.”
Gorsuch and Kavanaugh appeared offended by more than the decision of the one judge in the case before them, as they saw fit to add in petulant fashion that, “This is now the third time in a matter of weeks this court has had to intercede in a case ‘squarely controlled’ by one of its precedents… When this court issues a decision, it constitutes a precedent that commands respect in lower courts.”
Judge William G. Young, whose decision was before the high court, apparently took this criticism to heart. He began a recent hearing in that case by apologizing to Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, expressing that it was never his intent to defy precedent and that such behavior would be “foreign in every respect to the nature of how I have conducted myself as a judicial officer.”
(Young—a Reagan appointee who was confirmed as a federal judge before either Gorsuch or Kavanaugh had even started law school—subsequently found himself defended by no less a legal luminary than former SCOTUS Stephen Breyer, who told the New York Times Young was “ a very decent person and a good judge.”)
The admonishments are striking not only for their gratuitousness (lower courts by definition have to heed the Supreme Court) but also because they suggest Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are worried about losing the deference of the lower courts—even their respect. And it turns out they may have good reason.
A federal trial court judge in Massachusetts, Allison Burroughs, offered criticism right back at SCOTUS in a September ruling, writing that a series of high court rulings on the Trump administration’s efforts to end government grants “have not been models of clarity, and have left many issues unresolved.” She added that sometimes the rulings appear to shift the law “without much explanation or consensus.” Such criticism, while not personal nor defiant, hits the high court where it hurts: in the quality of their legal work as a court.
Just last week, a federal appeals court for the First Circuit made plain its similar struggle to discern exactly what legal reasoning the Supreme Court had set forth in its shadow docket case that allowed mass layoffs at the Department of Education. “It is not clear from this order which of the appellant’s arguments for a stay request led the Court to stay the preliminary injunction in that case,” the court wrote.
Georgetown University professor Steve Vladeck, author of The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic, has noted the problems with the high court’s record-breaking use of the shadow docket, a mechanism which allows the justices to avoid giving full opinions explaining their decisions. As Vladeck put it: “If the justices in the majority want lower courts to treat its rulings as precedential, then they need to say much more about why they’re granting emergency relief in the first place… Indeed, that’s how legal analysis … works.” Ouch.
Nowhere has the lack of guidance provided by SCOTUS more clear than in a remarkable colloquy within the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals as they considered how to apply the high court’s decisions in a case concerning DOGE’s access to Social Security data.
Judge James Wynn, an Obama appointee, described the justices as having left the courts “flailing,” and “out in limbo.”
“We need to understand why you did it. We judges would just love to hear your reasoning as to why you rule that way,” Wynn noted. “We will follow the law. We will follow the Supreme Court, but we’d like to know what it is we are following.”
In that same debate, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a Reagan appointee, declared “The Supreme Court’s actions must mean something. It doesn’t do things just for the kicks of it.”
The spectacle that is gratuitous insults and derisive barbs lobbed from the highest court—a veritable family feud, and punching down if ever there was—certainly makes it look like the conservative justices are joining President Trump’s team in his long-running criticism of the federal courts (at least those that rule against him).
But even more alarming is the chatter from the lower courts that the Supreme Court is failing to provide clear legal precedent—can they really be skirting the boundaries set for them, as those conservatives are complaining, if they aren’t sure what those boundaries are? That kind of discord undermines not only the judiciary but the rule of law itself. Keeping the rules known only to those in power isn’t a system of justice. It’s a system of obedience.
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