Welcome back, Deadline: Legal newsletter readers. As far as stories of the week go, it’s hard to beat Tuesday night’s blue tsunami in the midterm elections.

But I want to highlight a remarkable development that came the night before, when the Supreme Court smacked down a voter suppression effort from the Trump administration. Although the news from the court was understandably overtaken by the following night’s electoral rout, this was no ordinary move from the justices.

Indeed, the court order sent a message that the justices did not take seriously at all what the federal government wanted them to do.

It wanted them to issue an order to set aside some 20,000 ballots from California voters whom the government claimed it had “identified as likely noncitizens.” Lower courts had rebuffed the request while questioning both its legality and accuracy. The administration turned to the high court for relief.

Due to the legally and factually dubious nature of the request, the application filed by the administration on Monday looked like a weak one. Plus, the justices have been blocking some of the more extreme GOP bids this election season. The application seemed destined for denial.

But the appellate panel that ruled against the administration was divided, with a Trump-appointed judge arguing in dissent that the Justice Department was only seeking “modest” relief that “would not cancel any vote but would allow time to verify the eligibility of suspected noncitizens.”

That didn’t mean the administration would win at the Supreme Court. But the division in the lower court signaled that perhaps two or three sympathetic justices might dissent from a government loss; maybe that would include Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, whom President Donald Trump called “legends” after they were the only two dissenters from a September order rejecting his desired mail ballot restrictions for the midterms.

Either way, when the DOJ filed its California application on Monday, the only real question appeared to be when (not if) it would be denied.

To understand what happened next, it’s useful to provide some context for how these shadow docket applications typically unfold. When a litigant files an emergency motion to the Supreme Court, it first goes to the justice who is assigned to field such filings from the relevant lower court’s geographical region. The justices then usually refer significant matters to their colleagues for final resolutions, but sometimes they handle easy ones themselves.

Justice Elena Kagan is currently assigned to receive urgent filings from California, so the application went first to her. On top of seeking an injunction to force the state to segregate mail ballots from people purportedly “identified as likely noncitizens,” the application also sought an immediate “administrative” injunction, which would have provided instant relief while the full court decided how to handle the application.

One thing that I felt pretty sure about was that, no matter how the case would turn out, Kagan was not going to grant that immediate administrative relief for the government. That meant the next thing I was waiting to hear was what sort of litigation schedule the Obama-appointed justice would set — meaning what deadline she would set for California’s opposition brief.

But that’s when the extraordinary thing happened. The next entry on the docket came Monday evening, but it wasn’t an instruction telling California when to respond. It was the order itself, from the full court, denying the application in a one-sentence, unexplained action that simply said: “The application for injunction pending appeal presented to Justice Kagan and by her referred to the Court is denied.”

It’s hardly unprecedented for the court to issue such an order, but to do it so quickly, apparently unanimously and, most of all, without even making California respond to the supposedly urgent request from the federal government is not something that I anticipated, nor is it something that I can recall ever happening in this way.

The message the court sent with the outright rejection was that the DOJ’s request was so bogus, the justices didn’t even need to formally consider the opposing party’s view to deny it. None of the justices published a peep objecting to that course of action. While we don’t know what happened behind the scenes, the order the court shared with the country had as much buy-in from Kagan as it did from the Trump-anointed legendary duo of Thomas and Alito.

Those “legends” are reportedly not retiring yet, despite the impending Democratic Senate takeover. That means the court’s two eldest justices, both in their late 70s, could be well into their 80s before Republicans potentially control the White House and the Senate simultaneously again. If a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028 and those justices leave the court during that time, then the 6-3 court in favor of GOP appointees could turn 5-4 the other way.

We don’t know what the future holds, but the rare election-eve order is one that court watchers might remember as much as the blue wave that rolled in the next night. While voters soundly repudiated the president’s party with their votes, the justices did the same with theirs against his DOJ.

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