‘Wasn't supposed to go up today’: Bloomberg reporter on Supreme Court mistakenly posting document

Joining us now, the Bloomberg News Supreme Court reporter who broke this story, Greg Store. Great. Good to have you. I I'm just very curious, how did you come across this? How did you find this? Well, all I can tell you is it was very briefly on the Corpse Courts website and then disappeared. It was put out there around the time the court released two other opinions this morning. Apparently wasn't supposed to go out. The court later said that there was an inadvertent posting on the web and then it just disappeared. Have you ever experienced anything like this before? Before? Have you seen them mistakenly post a document like this? I've seen a couple of occasions like this, although I wasn't one of the ones lucky enough to have seen it early in those previous cases where the court in those other cases, I think posted things a little bit early. There's one case that I recall where they posted an orders list maybe 1/2 hour or an hour before it was supposed to go up. This appears to be something that wasn't supposed to go up today at all, probably what was designed to come down later on this week or early next week. And when you say it appears it wasn't supposed to go up today at all, is that partially because the formatting is just not like a normal Supreme Court decision? No, the, the, the formatting may have to do with the, the kind of decision. This is this is a decision where they essentially said we're backing out of this case and we're lifting this stay we had entered earlier. No, it's more of a question of, of the fact that, you know, this time of year or any time of year, the court announces its opinions from the bench. And so you wait for the Chief Justice to say, you know, justice, so and so has our opinion in such and such case. And he didn't say that with regard to this case today, today. And that's why seemingly it should not have been put out there when it was first when you first broke this story. And this is your first interview, by the way, since breaking it. And thank you for coming on this show. But when it first came out there, I think a lot of people thought about what happened with the decision to overturn Roe V Wade, the Dobbs decision a couple years ago. A draft of that decision was leaked to a couple of reporters at Politico early on. This is not the same thing. No, this is not the same thing. In terms of how how we got it, as I described, it was just a matter of of we happened to, to be able to pull it from the website very briefly. It is similar to the extent that this could still change. This is not a final decision. The court made that clear. You know, when an opinion you like this, when, when the court maybe pulls it back or is what seems to have been what happened, there's a possibility that a justice will say, I want to change something in the opinion, maybe even change my vote. Now, there's no reason to think that the outcome of this case is going to be different. But much like with the Dobbs case, there is the possibility that something could change when the court does release its final opinion. You are a Supreme Court reporter. You followed this case. You follow Supreme Court decisions. Can you tell me what stood out to you reading through this decision regarding Idaho and Amtala? Well, I will say I was a bit surprised just because of the way the court had handled this case previously. They intervened fairly aggressively to a block this lower court order that that was designed to ensure that women in Idaho could get abortions in hospitals if they had an emergency that threatened, that posed a serious to deal with a serious health risk. The court intervened and said, no, we're going to let Idaho fully enforce its very strict abortion ban, which has only an exception for when the life of the mother is in danger. And basically, the court backed away from all that. Now the court is allowing abortions to go forward in Idaho on an emergency basis in hospitals. And that was not something, even though the justices clearly seem to be struggling with it during the arguments, that was not something I was really predicting in terms of the outcome of this case. Yeah. Because in the arguments, they, the the women in the court seemed pretty hostile to the argument that Idaho was making where a woman needs to be put on a on a plane to get emergency medical treatment. I, does it signal some sort of internal turmoil within the court? I mean, I would imagine that if, if that, if the women in the court felt the same way as they did during they, they seem to at least during the oral arguments, that they would be on a pretty clear side on this argument. Do you think that there's a conflict between them potentially and some of the, the men on the court? Well, I agree with you about that. That's how the, the argument sounded. It was the, the women. And, of course, three of them are the liberal justices. And the 4th is Amy Coney Barrett, who is appointed by President Trump. That they were, you know, pretty concerned about letting Idaho fully enforce its law. They obviously got at least they got at least a couple more votes or got two more votes to sort of back away from this case because there were only three justices who descended from basically the outcome of this case. There is certainly a lot of turmoil in this court. There's a lot of, we've seen it in all the opinions that have been coming out the last couple weeks. There's a lot of back and forth. And I have to imagine that somebody like Chief Justice John Roberts would recognize that an opinion where you had the four women on the court on one side of an abortion case talking about the threat to Women's Health would not be a good look for this court. And so I wouldn't be surprised if he were listening to them very much. They were talking, by the way, about the medical procedures and and the parts involved. They were very clear about the medical part of this debate while while the men were much more fuzzy on those details. Greg, Sir Greg, thank you so much for joining us and congratulations and refreshing your page at just the right time. We appreciate you coming on. Sure thing.