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The New York Times recently published leaked Supreme Court memos from 2016, when a majority of justices voted to block the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan before any lower court had ruled on it. Chief Justice Roberts argued the EPA regulations would cause "irreparable harm" through a "substantial and irreversible reordering of the domestic power sector." It was the wrong standard - the lower court hadn't been given a chance to rule. And it was applied with no consideration of the harm the Obama administration would suffer from having its major policy blocked. Now read that against the second Trump administration's record on the same emergency docket. The Trump administration has filed a record number of shadow docket applications and has won 80 percent of the time. The Court has allowed, through this process with little or no written reasoning, mass layoffs at the Education Department, racial profiling in immigration sweeps, and the termination of legal immigration status for hundreds of thousands of people. The "irreparable harm" standard Roberts applied in 2016 - that delay in implementing a desired policy causes sufficient harm to justify emergency intervention - is precisely what he applied to the Obama climate rule. The same standard has since been applied to Trump administration policies that, by any measure, have produced a far greater reordering of American institutions than anything the Clean Power Plan envisioned. The memos reveal something simple: the standard was not principled in 2016. The record since then confirms it still isn't.