Latest news with #TheShadowDocket
Arabian Post
2 days ago
- Politics
- Arabian Post
U.S. Supreme Court Is Being Used By Trump To Implement His MAGA Agenda
By T N Ashok WASHINGTON: In a landmark but largely silent move, the U.S. Supreme Court has paved the way for former President Donald Trump to dismantle the Department of Education, terminate thousands of federal employees, and slash funding to states — all without providing a single word of legal justification. Issued as a terse four-sentence, unsigned emergency order, the Court's decision marks a deepening reliance on the so-called 'shadow docket' — a fast-track legal mechanism that allows the Court to make sweeping rulings without full briefing, oral arguments, or detailed opinions. This latest ruling continues a growing trend under Trump's second term, in which the Court has used abbreviated procedures to rubber-stamp controversial executive actions — bypassing normal legal scrutiny and raising concerns about democratic accountability and constitutional balance. The Supreme Court's quiet approval of Trump's efforts to effectively shutter the Education Department is not an isolated case. Over recent months, the Court has: approved the firing of tens of thousands of federal workers; Permitted the discharge of transgender service members; Lifted protections for hundreds of thousands of migrants from conflict zones; allowed the President to fire leaders of independent federal agencies; granted powers traditionally held by Congress to the executive branch. And in most of these cases, the Court offered little or no explanation — just brief procedural rulings with outsized consequences. Georgetown law professor Stephen I. Vladeck, an expert on the Court's emergency procedures and author of The Shadow Docket, noted in his newsletter: 'Monday's ruling is just the latest completely unexplained decision that is going to have massive real-world effects long before the justices ever confront whether what the government is doing is actually lawful.' According to Vladeck, in the past 10 weeks alone, the Court has granted seven major emergency petitions from the Trump administration without any written rationale — a rate that far exceeds any prior administration. The US supreme court' full bench comprises nine judges — six appointed by presidents preceding Trump — three by George W Bush, two by Barack Obama, and one by Joe Biden. Trump himself appointed three judges to the SC in his first term including Chief Justice John Roberts. In sharp contrast to the majority's silence, Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a blistering 19-page dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, warning of the erosion of constitutional safeguards. (Soomayor and Elena Kagan were appointed by Barack Obama and Ketanji Brown Jackson by Joe Biden). 'The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naïve,' Sotomayor wrote. 'Either way, the threat to our Constitution's separation of powers is grave.' Her dissent emphasized that decisions of this magnitude deserve public explanation and judicial accountability, especially when they reshape the structure of government. 'By abandoning our duty to explain,' she wrote, 'we are undermining the legitimacy of this institution and the rule of law itself.' The 'shadow docket' — a term coined by law professor William Baude and popularized by critics of the Court — refers to emergency rulings made without full arguments or opinions. While initially used sparingly, the Court's use of it has exploded in recent years. Justice Elena Kagan publicly criticized this trend in 2021, writing: 'The majority's decision is emblematic of too much of this Court's shadow-docket decision making — which every day becomes more unreasoned, inconsistent, and impossible to defend.' One particularly controversial moment came in 2021, when the Court refused to block a Texas abortion law that effectively nullified Roe v. Wade — again without full briefing or explanation. That emergency ruling previewed the Court's eventual nationwide overturning of Roe the following year. Justice Samuel Alito, in a 2021 speech at Notre Dame, defended the emergency docket and dismissed the term 'shadow docket' as a political smear. 'The catchy and sinister term 'shadow docket' has been used to portray the Court as having been captured by a dangerous cabal,' Alito said. 'This portrayal feeds efforts to intimidate the Court and damage it as an independent institution.' Alito likened emergency orders to emergency medicine: 'You can't expect EMTs to act like a full surgical team,' he said. 'The urgency of the moment often demands quick, narrow decisions.' He also pushed back against media criticism: 'Journalists may think we can dash off opinions the way they dash off articles,' Alito said. 'But every word we write has consequences, so we must be deliberate — even in silence.' But many legal scholars argue that deliberate silence can be even more damaging than hasty explanation. Daniel Epps, a law professor at Washington University, put it plainly: 'Unexplained orders expose the Court to suspicion and criticism, especially in a polarized political climate.' While he acknowledged the need for caution in creating precedent, Epps argued that even short explanations would be better than none: 'In May, the Court allowed Trump to fire leaders of independent agencies. That ruling was just two pages — but enough to guide future courts while leaving some flexibility.' In contrast, rulings with zero reasoning, he said, create confusion in lower courts and fuel public distrust. A June ruling allowed the Trump administration to deport migrants to third-party countries without a hearing — but did not clarify who the order applied to. This led to a new emergency application for clarification days later. Only then did the Court issue a more detailed follow-up, permitting the deportation of men held at a U.S. base in Djibouti to South Sudan. 'This back-and-forth could have been avoided with a single explanatory sentence,' said Professor Vladeck. America has turned into a land legal chaos and continuing confusion. (IPA Service)
Straits Times
3 days ago
- Politics
- Straits Times
US Supreme Court keeps ruling in Trump's favour, but doesn't say why
In the past 10 weeks alone, the court has granted emergency relief to the Trump administration without explanation seven times. WASHINGTON – In clearing the way for President Donald Trump's efforts to transform American government, the Supreme Court has issued a series of orders that often lacked a fundamental characteristic of most judicial work: an explanation of the court's rationale. On July 14, for instance, in letting Mr Trump dismantle the Education Department, the majority's unsigned order was a single four-sentence paragraph entirely devoted to the procedural mechanics of pausing a lower court's ruling. What the order did not include was any explanation of why the court had ruled as it did. It was an exercise of power, not reason. The silence was even more striking in the face of a 19-page dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. 'The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive,' Ms Sotomayor wrote, 'but either way the threat to our Constitution's separation of powers is grave'. The question of whether the nation's highest court owes the public an explanation for its actions has grown along with the rise of the 'emergency docket,' which uses truncated procedures to produce terse provisional orders meant to remain in effect only while the courts consider the lawfulness of the challenged actions. In practice, the orders often effectively resolve the case. The court has allowed the administration to fire tens of thousands of government workers, discharge transgender troops, end protections for hundreds of thousands of migrants from war-torn countries and fundamentally shift power from Congress to the president – often with scant or no explanation of how it arrived at those results. Top stories Swipe. Select. Stay informed. Singapore HSA launches anti-vaping checks near 5 institutes of higher learning Singapore Over 600 Telegram groups in Singapore selling, advertising vapes removed by HSA Business Singapore key exports surprise with 13% rebound in June amid tariff uncertainty Business Market versus mission: What will Income Insurance choose? Life First look at the new Singapore Oceanarium at Resorts World Sentosa Opinion AI and education: We need to know where this sudden marriage is heading Singapore Coffee Meets Bagel's Singpass check: Why I'll swipe right on that Singapore Jail for man who fatally hit his daughter, 2, while driving van without licence In the past 10 weeks alone, the court has granted emergency relief to the Trump administration without explanation seven times, according to a tally by Mr Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown and the author of a book about the court's emergency work called 'The Shadow Docket.' The ruling on July 14, Mr Vladeck wrote this week in his newsletter, was the latest 'completely unexplained' ruling 'that is going to have massive real-world effects long before the justices ever confront whether what the government is doing is actually lawful'. All of this is in stark contrast with cases on the court's merits docket, which unfold over about a year and include two rounds of briefs, oral arguments, painstaking deliberations and the exchange of draft opinions. The end result is often a comprehensive set of opinions that can be as long as a short novel. The court usually rules on emergency applications in a matter of weeks. Critics call the emergency docket 'the shadow docket,' and its use was on the rise even before it was turbocharged with the arrival of Trump's second administration. Justice Elena Kagan used that term in 2021 in criticising the court's work. The majority had just issued a midnight ruling that left in place a Texas law effectively overturning Roe v. Wade in the state – as the court would do nationwide in 2026. In dissent, Ms Kagan wrote that 'the majority's decision is emblematic of too much of this court's shadow-docket decision making – which every day becomes more unreasoned, inconsistent and impossible to defend'. A month later, Justice Samuel Alito returned fire in a speech at Notre Dame defending the court's approach to emergency applications. 'The catchy and sinister term 'shadow docket' has been used to portray the court as having been captured by a dangerous cabal that resorts to sneaky and improper methods to get its ways,' he said. 'This portrayal feeds unprecedented efforts to intimidate the court and to damage it as an independent institution.' He compared the court's procedures to the ones used by emergency medical technicians called to the scene of an accident. 'You can't expect the EMTs and the emergency rooms to do the same thing that a team of physicians and nurses will do when they are handling a matter when time is not of the essence in the same way,' he said. On the question of scant or absent reasoning, Mr Alito argued that sometimes it is better to say less. 'Journalists may think that we can just dash off an opinion the way they dash off articles,' he said, but 'when we issue an opinion, we are aware that every word that we write can have consequences, sometimes enormous consequences, so we have to be careful about every single thing that we say.' That argument has some weight, said Mr Daniel Epps, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. 'Whether the court should explain its emergency orders presents a difficult trade-off,' he said. 'On the one hand, whenever the court writes any kind of majority opinion, even one only a few sentences long, it creates precedent that courts and lawyers feel bound to follow.' That must be done with care and consideration, he said. On the other hand, he said, 'unexplained orders expose the court to suspicion and criticism.' 'In a highly polarised climate where the court is often accused of acting politically,' he said, 'the justices should feel a heightened obligation to explain their decisions to the public.' Mr Epps said he favored providing some explanation, pointing to an order in May that allowed Trump to fire two leaders of independent agencies. The two-page majority opinion was, he said, long enough to provide some explanation but 'tentative enough to leave some wiggle room.' As it happened, the meaning of that opinion has been contested, and it is the subject of a new application pending before the court. Orders without any reasoning at all can create confusion in the lower courts. In June, for instance, the court allowed the Trump administration to deport migrants to countries other than their own without giving them a chance to show that they would face the risk of torture. The order gave no reasons, and the dissent said it did not apply to men held at an American military base in Djibouti. The court's silence led to a new application days later seeking clarification. The court then issued an order this month with more than two pages of reasons, enough to allow the administration to send the men to South Sudan. NYTIMES
Boston Globe
3 days ago
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Supreme Court keeps ruling in Trump's favor, but doesn't say why
What the order did not include was any explanation of why the court had ruled as it did. It was an exercise of power, not reason. The silence was even more striking in the face of a 19-page dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. 'The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive,' Sotomayor wrote, 'but either way the threat to our Constitution's separation of powers is grave.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up The question of whether the nation's highest court owes the public an explanation for its actions has grown along with the rise of the 'emergency docket,' which uses truncated procedures to produce terse provisional orders meant to remain in effect only while the courts consider the lawfulness of the challenged actions. In practice, the orders often effectively resolve the case. Advertisement The court has allowed the administration to fire tens of thousands of government workers, discharge transgender troops, end protections for hundreds of thousands of migrants from war-torn countries, and fundamentally shift power from Congress to the president — often with scant or no explanation of how it arrived at those results. Advertisement In the past 10 weeks alone, the court has granted emergency relief to the Trump administration without explanation seven times, according to a tally by Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University and the author of a book about the court's emergency work called 'The Shadow Docket.' (In that time, the court issued roughly the same number of emergency orders in which the majority gave at least a bit of explanation.) Monday's ruling, Vladeck wrote this week in his newsletter, was the latest 'completely unexplained' ruling 'that is going to have massive real-world effects long before the justices ever confront whether what the government is doing is actually lawful.' All of this is in stark contrast with cases on the court's merits docket, which unfold over about a year and include two rounds of briefs, oral arguments, painstaking deliberations, and the exchange of draft opinions. The end result is often a comprehensive set of opinions that can be as long as a short novel. The court usually rules on emergency applications in a matter of weeks. Critics call the emergency docket 'the shadow docket,' and its use was on the rise even before it was turbocharged with the arrival of Trump's second administration. Justice Elena Kagan used that term in 2021 in criticizing the court's work. The majority had just issued a midnight ruling that left in place a Texas law effectively overturning Roe v. Wade in the state — as the court would do nationwide the next year. In dissent, Kagan wrote that 'the majority's decision is emblematic of too much of this court's shadow-docket decision making — which every day becomes more unreasoned, inconsistent and impossible to defend.' Advertisement A month later, Justice Samuel Alito returned fire in a speech at Notre Dame defending the court's approach to emergency applications. 'The catchy and sinister term 'shadow docket' has been used to portray the court as having been captured by a dangerous cabal that resorts to sneaky and improper methods to get its ways,' he said. 'This portrayal feeds unprecedented efforts to intimidate the court and to damage it as an independent institution.' He compared the court's procedures to the ones used by emergency medical technicians called to the scene of an accident. 'You can't expect the EMTs and the emergency rooms to do the same thing that a team of physicians and nurses will do when they are handling a matter when time is not of the essence in the same way,' he said. On the question of scant or absent reasoning, Alito argued that sometimes it is better to say less. 'Journalists may think that we can just dash off an opinion the way they dash off articles,' he said, but 'when we issue an opinion, we are aware that every word that we write can have consequences, sometimes enormous consequences, so we have to be careful about every single thing that we say.' That argument has some weight, said Daniel Epps, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. 'Whether the court should explain its emergency orders presents a difficult trade-off,' he said. 'On the one hand, whenever the court writes any kind of majority opinion, even one only a few sentences long, it creates precedent that courts and lawyers feel bound to follow.' That must be done with care and consideration, he said. On the other hand, he said, 'unexplained orders expose the court to suspicion and criticism.' Advertisement 'In a highly polarized climate where the court is often accused of acting politically,' he said, 'the justices should feel a heightened obligation to explain their decisions to the public.' Epps said he favored providing some explanation, pointing to an order in May that allowed Trump to fire two leaders of independent agencies. The two-page majority opinion was, he said, long enough to provide some explanation but 'tentative enough to leave some wiggle room.' As it happened, the meaning of that opinion has been contested, and it is the subject of a new application pending before the court. Orders without any reasoning at all can create confusion in the lower courts. In June, for instance, the court allowed the Trump administration to deport migrants to countries other than their own without giving them a chance to show that they would face the risk of torture. The order gave no reasons, and the dissent said it did not apply to men held at an American military base in Djibouti. The court's silence led to a new application days later seeking clarification. The court then issued an order this month with more than two pages of reasons, enough to allow the administration to send the men to South Sudan. This article originally appeared in
Chicago Tribune
29-03-2025
- Politics
- Chicago Tribune
President Trump increasingly asks the Supreme Court to overrule judges blocking key parts of his agenda
WASHINGTON — As losses mount in lower federal courts, President Donald Trump has returned to a tactic that he employed at the Supreme Court with remarkable success in his first term. Three times in the past week, and six since Trump took office a little more than two months ago, the Justice Department has asked the conservative-majority high court to step into cases much earlier than usual. The administration's use of the emergency appeals, or shadow docket, comes as it faces more than 130 lawsuits over the Republican president's flurry of executive orders. Many of the lawsuits have been filed in liberal-leaning parts of the country as the court system becomes ground zero for pushback to his policies. Federal judges have ruled against the administration more than 40 times, issuing temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions, the Justice Department said Friday in a Supreme Court filing. The issues include birthright citizenship changes, federal spending, transgender rights and deportations under a rarely used 18th-century law. The administration is increasingly asking the Supreme Court, which Trump helped shape by nominating three justices, to step in, not only to rule in its favor but also to send a message to federal judges, who Trump and his allies claim are overstepping their authority. 'Only this Court can stop rule-by-TRO from further upending the separation of powers — the sooner, the better,' acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris wrote Friday in the deportations case, referring to the temporary restraining orders. Stephen Vladeck, the Georgetown University law professor who chronicled the rise of emergency appeals in his book, 'The Shadow Docket,' wrote on the Substack platform that 'these cases, especially together, reflect the inevitable reckoning — just how much is the Supreme Court going to stand up to Trump?' In the first Trump administration, the Justice Department made emergency appeals to the Supreme Court 41 times and won all or part of what it wanted in 28 cases, Vladeck found. Before that, the Obama and George W. Bush administrations asked the court for emergency relief in just eight cases over 16 years. Supreme Court cases generally unfold over many months. Emergency action more often occurs over weeks, or even a few days, with truncated briefing and decisions that are usually issued without the elaborate legal reasoning that typically accompanies high court rulings. So far this year, the justices have effectively sidestepped the administration's requests. But that could get harder as the number of appeals increase, including in high-profile deportation cases where an extraordinary call from the president to impeach a judge prompted a rare rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts. Here's a look at the appeals on the court's emergency docket: Trump's deportation order will be a critical test Immigration and the promise of mass deportations were at the center of Trump's winning presidential campaign, and earlier this month, he took the rare step of invoking an 18th-century wartime law to speed deportations of Venezuelan migrants accused of belonging to the Tren de Aragua gang. Lawyers for the migrants, several of whom say they are not gang members, sued to block the deportations without due process. U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg, the chief judge at the federal courthouse in Washington, agreed. He ordered deportation flights to be temporarily halted and planes already making their way to a prison in El Salvador be turned around. Two planes still landed, and a court fight over whether the administration defied his order continued to play out even as the administration unsuccessfully asked the appeals court in the nation's capital to lift his order. In an appeal to the Supreme Court filed Friday, the Justice Department argued that the deportations should be allowed to resume and that the migrants should make their case in a federal court in Texas, where they are being detained. Mass firings of federal workers have generated lawsuits Thousands of federal workers have been let go as the Trump administration seeks to dramatically downsize the federal government. The firings of probationary workers, who usually have less time on the job and fewer protections, have drawn multiple lawsuits. Two judges have found the administration broke federal laws in its handling of the layoffs and ordered workers reinstated. The government went to the Supreme Court after a California-based judge said some 16,000 workers must be restored to their positions. The judge said it appeared the administration had lied in its reasons for firing the workers. The administration said he overstepped his authority by trying to force hiring and firing decisions on the executive branch. Anti-DEI teacher training cuts have been blocked, at least temporarily Trump has moved quickly to try and root out diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the government and in education. Eight Democratic-led states argued in a lawsuit that the push was at the root of a decision to cut hundreds of millions of dollars for teacher training. A federal judge in Boston has temporarily blocked the cuts, finding they were already affecting training programs aimed at addressing a nationwide teacher shortage. After an appeals court kept that order in place, the Justice Department went to the Supreme Court. The administration argues that judges can't force it to keep paying out money that it has decided to cancel. Trump wanted to end birthright citizenship. So far, courts have disagreed On Inauguration Day, Trump signed an executive order that, going forward, would deny citizenship to babies born to parents in the country illegally. The order restricting the right enshrined in the Constitution was quickly blocked nationwide. Three appeals court also rejected pleas to let it go into effect while lawsuits play out. The Justice Department didn't appeal to the Supreme Court to overturn those rulings right away, but instead asked the justices to narrow the court orders to only the people who filed the lawsuits. The government argued that individual judges lack the power to give nationwide effect to their rulings, touching on a legal issue that's concerned some justices before.
