Trump v. Cook · ¶181

Of course, parties may appropriately seek (and courts may appropriately grant) stays early in a litigation. No court, including this Court, should sit on its hands when interim relief is appropriate. But this does not mean that the Court must reach out to opine on each issue that could conceivably arise in a case’s future. Here, the incipiency of this case and the complexity of the issues that it presents counseled in favor of a light touch by this Court, regardless of whether we granted or denied the application. To that end, the Court should have resolved the President’s application shortly after we received it. And in doing so, we should have focused on the few issues that the courts addressed below. If a majority had desired, we could have issued a statement explaining our decision. That is exactly how we have handled nearly all our stay applications in recent years.

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