WASHINGTON (CN) - A top House Democrat on Thursday unveiled a package of legislation he said would shine a spotlight on the Supreme Court's shadow docket and demystify the justices' secretive and often unexplained emergency orders.

But while a trio of bills from Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin would implement reforms - such as forcing the justices to explain their rulings from the shadow docket and altering the process for selecting cases for Supreme Court review - none of the measures appear to put a stop to the high court's increased use of emergency orders to rule on cases with far-reaching consequences.

During President Donald Trump's second term in office, the Supreme Court's shadow docket has become a frequent avenue for the administration to seek emergency relief in major cases challenging the president's policy agenda. The justices have considered dozens of appeals from the White House on its shadow docket and have overwhelmingly ruled in its favor. In most cases, the high court has handed down those emergency decisions in unsigned, unreasoned orders.

Raskin's package of legislation, introduced Thursday morning and obtained exclusively by Courthouse News, would attempt to address the opaque nature of the shadow docket by requiring the Supreme Court to issue public legal justification for orders issued from the emergency pool within seven days.

According to the Supreme Court Honesty and Disclosure Orders and Writs, or SHADOW, Act, the justices would need to lay out "on the record" their basis for issuing an emergency order halting a lower court's action. Such an explanation would require the high court to show that refusing to grant a stay would cause "specific, concrete and irreparable injury" to the petitioner and that the emergency ruling does not include findings on the merits of the case at hand.

The Supreme Court would also need to publicly declare whether issuing relief would affect other parties interested in the proceedings, as well as whether its determination is in the public interest.

A separate bill unveiled by Raskin on Thursday would establish a "Supreme Court Certification Panel," composed of a rotating panel of judges from federal appellate courts, who would be put in charge of deciding which cases go before the justices.

Like the high court's current process for selecting cases, the measure proposes any petition for Supreme Court review secure four votes from the panel of appellate judges. Each decision to grant a petition, known as a writ of certiorari, would include a written statement "briefly explaining the reason for granting such request and identifying the questions presented for review."

The package's third bill would address an issue raised by the Supreme Court in a recent shadow docket ruling in the case National Institutes of Health v. American Public Health Association. In that emergency decision, the justices held the Trump administration could cancel nearly $800 million in public health grants, because only the Court of Federal Claims has jurisdiction to review such disputes.

Raskin's Federal Funding Protection Act, however, would affirm federal district courts' authority to hear monetary claims against the government if they are part of a larger case already before a judge.

In a statement to Courthouse News, the Maryland Democrat argued his package of proposed reforms "brings sunlight" to the Supreme Court's secretive deliberations on shadow docket cases.

"The Supreme Court is issuing emergency rulings with life-altering consequences for millions of people often with no explanation at all," said Raskin. "In case after case, authoritative lower court opinions are being reversed without analysis in the dark of the shadow docket while the public is left to guess at the reasoning. And the Court's decisions about its case docket take place entirely behind closed doors with no accountability or record. That is not how justice in a constitutional democracy should work."

Though they seek to hike transparency in how the Supreme Court handles shadow docket decisions, the legislative trio does not slap new limits of the types of cases the justices can rule on using emergency authority.

Legal experts have warned about the Supreme Court's expanded use of the shadow docket - which has traditionally been used for true emergency cases such as petitions to stay executions - into cases where the justices' temporary rulings can have lasting effects. The Trump administration in recent months has sought shadow docket relief on challenges to its closure of the Department of Education and its effort to halt temporary legal status determinations for Haitian and Syrian migrants, among other things.

Although rulings from the Supreme Court's shadow docket are intended as a short-term patch while litigation proceeds, experts have said the White House can use that extra time to carry out unilateral executive action that's hard to unroll, even if the court ultimately decides the administration acted unlawfully.

Still, Raskin framed his proposed legislation as a necessary step to overcoming the "procedural chaos" of the shadow docket and the certiorari process.

"Courts don't lose authority when they explain themselves - that's where their legitimacy comes from," he told Courthouse News.

As of Thursday morning, the Maryland Democrat's package of bills had yet to be assigned to a committee, though they are likely to end up before the House's judiciary panel where Raskin serves as ranking member. Congressional Republicans, however, have historically been resistant to legislative efforts to reform the Supreme Court, as have some of the justices themselves.

Source: Courthouse News Service