Clear Statements is a recurring series by Abbe R. Gluck on civil litigation and the modern regulatory and statutory state.

Rumors of the textualist triumph over legislative history have been greatly exaggerated.

A debate has raged among lawyers and judges for decades about the changes the Supreme Court’s textualists have wrought in statutory interpretation. One of textualism’s key moves has been to argue that congressional intent is inscrutable in a 535-member body and so congressional materials – especially legislative history, such as floor statements and committee reports from the enactment process – should not be considered, instead of an approach focused only on the words actually enacted. Critics have responded that interpreting statutory text divorced from the purpose or history of a statute’s enactment actually enlarges, not cabins, judicial discretion and does not give sufficient respect to Congress’ collective intentions or work-product.

Updated on April 9 at 11:41 a.m.

The Supreme Court on Thursday declined to block Ohio officials from removing Sam Ronan, who was running as a Republican for the state’s 15th congressional district, from Ohio’s Republican primary election ballot.

Lawyers for Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, as well as county election officials, had urged the court on Wednesday to let them go ahead with a ballot that does not Ronan. Ohio Solicitor General Mathura Sridharan, representing LaRose, told the justices that Ronan faced “an all-but-insurmountable obstacle” to obtaining relief, because he is seeking “an extraordinary, first-in-time injunction reinstating his candidacy in an ongoing election.”

Civil Rights and Wrongs is a recurring series by Daniel Harawa covering criminal justice and civil rights cases before the court.

I have written before about the Supreme Court’s troubling habit of summarily closing the courthouse doors on those with the least power in our legal system. Just last month, I wrote about Klein v. Martin and Clark v. Sweeney, two cases in which the court summarily reversed (that is, reversed a lower court decision without full briefing or oral argument) grants of relief to prisoners. I explained how the back-to-back summary reversals risked sending a chilling message to lower courts about the costs of taking prisoners’ constitutional claims seriously. I argued then that a pattern was emerging that deserved attention.

Zorn v. Linton, decided last month, seems to confirm that pattern, albeit in a different context.

In early January, as the country eagerly awaited a tariffs ruling that – as it turned out – was still more than a month away, Supreme Court watchers raised concerns about the court’s pace. They questioned whether the justices had fallen behind on writing opinions in the 27 cases they had heard by that point, perhaps because of the Trump administration’s ongoing requests for emergency relief.

And the data seemed to bear this out: As The New York Times reported, this term was only the second in the past eight decades in which the court waited until January to release an opinion in an argued case; in “70 of the last 80 terms, the first merits decisions were issued in October or November.”

So, approximately three months later, where do things stand?

While I have written multiple posts for SCOTUSblog on birthright citizenship, a substantial part of my practice is litigating Second Amendment claims. In light of that experience, I was struck when listening to the Trump v. Barbara argument that the challengers’ counsel Cecillia Wang repeatedly insisted that the exceptions to birthright citizenship (such as for the children of ambassadors, tribal Indians, and invading armies) are “a closed set” – i.e., that the exceptions were set in 1868 with the adoption of the 14th Amendment and will always remain the same regardless of changed circumstances. This is a misunderstanding of originalism. As the court has explained in the Second Amendment context, the Constitution does not create “a law trapped in amber.” Rather, courts apply the original meaning of the Second Amendment to today’s circumstances, which can result in outcomes that are different from those at the Founding. A similar approach to the citizenship clause should be adopted in Trump v. Barbara.