The Supreme Court's Shadowy Plan to Subvert Democracy

"Courts play an important role in authoritarian regimes. They legitimize the actions of despots by declaring them "legal" or "constitutional." They ensure institutional compliance with the regime's rules. And they make politically unpopular decisions that align with the authoritarian's goals while giving the authoritarian political distance from those goals. Quite simply, you can't instigate a strongman takeover of a constitutional democracy without having a robust judicial power that's willing to play along."

"The Roberts court is game to do everything Trump wants it to do and, as an added bonus, to do most of it in secret, under cover of what's known as the shadow docket. The "shadow docket" is the colloquial term for the court's emergency docket-those cases for which the court, at the request of a litigant, issues expedited rulings and does so without a full briefing from the lawyers involved or a full hearing on the issue at hand."

"The emergency docket is supposed to be used for, well, emergencies: cases that require an immediate response to avert irrevocable harm. The classic emergency-docket case is a death-penalty appeal. A person set to be executed in the morning cannot wait for the court to consider their appeal in a year and a half. Technically, shadow-docket rulings are supposed to be temporary, pending a full hearing by the court on the merits of the case."

The Supreme Court's expanded use of the shadow docket grants expedited, often secretive rulings without full briefing or hearing. The emergency docket, intended for urgent, irreversible harms, has been repurposed to approve significant policy moves that frequently become effectively final. The Roberts Court has repeatedly issued such rulings that favor the Trump administration, enabling policies enacted in the interim that cannot be easily undone. This pattern centralizes power, legitimizes controversial actions, and undermines judicial transparency and the normal merits process, weakening institutional checks and threatening democratic norms.

Read at The Nation