On Thursday, in what some perceived as a slap at conservative Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who for the first time authored the court’s majority opinion in a case, the intellectual leader of the liberal wing of the Court, Justice Stephen Breyer, eschewed the normal wording beginning a dissent, “I respectfully dissent,” and instead wrote, “I dissent.”
The 7-2 decision in U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service v. Sierra Club, with the six nominally conservative judges (Samuel Alito, Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas) joined by liberal justice Elena Kagan, revolved around a FOIA request the environmental group Sierra Club filed for “draft biological opinions” that environmental officials produced in 2013 for the EPA. The Court ruled that the federal government does not have to fully disclose certain draft documents because they were covered by FOIA’s “deliberative process” privilege. That privilege permits the government to withhold documents the agency has created when crafting a new policy.
.png)
.png)
