BREAKING: Chief Justice John Roberts, without referring the matter to the rest of the court, issued a stay of a DC Dist Ct ruling that would have meant add'l disclosure requirements on Crossroads GPS and other similar groups. #SCOTUS 
The ruling of the US District Court in DC was set to take effect on Sept. 17. Here is Crossroads request for an emergency stay, which was submitted to Roberts on Friday: documentcloud.org/documents/4887…
Here is CREW's opposition to the stay request, filed earlier today: documentcloud.org/documents/4887…
Here is the underlying 113-page opinion from DC District Court Chief Judge Howell tossing out a longstanding FEC regulation — and explaining, broadly, what the heck this is all about. documentcloud.org/documents/4887…
Here are the underlying facts of this case:
In short, under a longstanding FEC rule about what you have to disclose when making an independent expenditure, Crossroads GPS (and the FEC eventually) argued that donor disclosure is only required if the donation is made for the *specific communication* being disclosed.
CREW and Howell said that's wrong under the law, regardless of the rule, so the rule must go. Howell gave the FEC time to pass a new rule, which they didn't do, and the ruling was set to go into effect on Monday.
Stays were sought without resolution from Howell and the DC Circuit, leading Crossroads to file the request for a stay at SCOTUS. All such requests go to an individual justice initially, and Roberts is assigned the DC Circuit.
In the interim, both the DC Circuit and District Court denied the stay applications filed in those courts — leaving SCOTUS as the only available outlet.
Such stay applications directed to individual justices at the Supreme Court can be acted on individually or referred to the full court. They often are referred in contested matters.
The language in Roberts' stay order about "pending further order" suggests he views this as a temporary measure, put in place to keep Howell's ruling from going into effect until the full Supreme Court can decide how it wishes to resolve the stay application request.
Nonetheless, absent further action, the district court's ruling striking down the FEC rule — which was due to take effect Monday — is on hold now, by order of the Supreme Court.
The only times I've generally seen such temp, one-justice stays are in death penalty cases from states where, absent a stay, the state will proceed with an execution even while a stay request is pending. In that instance, a single justice will issue a stay while SCOTUS considers.
And those are instances where it's a stay NOW or death. So, I'm not quite sure why the Chief decided that a Saturday afternoon stay was necessary when the ruling doesn't even go int effect until Monday. 🤔
The question I've been discussing with people is this: Did the Chief Justice's stay just reverse the effect of a 4-4 vote? In other words, previously it would have taken 5 votes to grant a stay. Does this now mean it takes 5 votes for the stay to be lifted?
To be clear, there have been non-death penalty single-justice stays. There's this example, and a Kennedy stay granted after the 9th Circuit's marriage ruling, for example.
It is totally possible, as @theglipper posits, that the Chief simply knows the matter will not be able to be resolved by the full court this weekend and so, rather than making all of the parties wait, he just issued the single-justice stay now rather than Sunday evening.
Side note: This is another instance where the court's procedures and rules seem almost designed to make knowing what is actually going on at the nation's highest court damn near impossible.
OK, going to try to sum all of this up in as plain of English as I can in two final tweets ...
Crossroads GPS & the FEC say independent expenditures only need to disclose donors when the donors give specifically for the expense being reported. CREW & the district court say that’s wrong under the law, so the FEC rule is invalid (and more donors would need to be disclosed).
The district court ruling was due to go into effect Monday, but Chief Justice John Roberts put that ruling on hold this afternoon — meaning the FEC rule will stay in place for now and donors don’t have to be disclosed — pending further action from him or the full Supreme Court.
