Why has the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration so often? In many cases, it won’t say.
My colleague Adam Liptak has a new story about a curious type of Supreme Court case. These aren’t the lawsuits about big constitutional questions. Those wind their way upward slowly through district and circuit courts. They yield rulings, reversals and reams of briefings along the way. At the end, justices interrogate lawyers during oral arguments and then exchange drafts of their views. The result, Adam writes, “is often a comprehensive set of opinions that can be as long as a short novel.”
The cases Adam writes about now are something else — emergency applications. These require a snap decision about whether a policy can go ahead or must wait while lower judges argue over its legality. Critics call this the “shadow docket,” and the court usually rules on the urgent cases within weeks. Trump has won almost all 18 of these petitions. And unlike normal rulings, justices often don’t explain their rationale. Some recent examples:
On Monday, the court said Trump could dismantle the Education Department. The unsigned order was a single paragraph about procedural mechanics. Adam called it “an exercise of power, not reason.”
In June, the court let the administration deport migrants to countries other than the ones they came from. Since the justices offered no rationale, the government had to ask for clarification about whether the ruling applied to men it had already sent to a U.S. base in Djibouti. (The answer was yes.)
In May, the court allowed Trump to enforce a ban on transgender troops serving in the U.S. military. Its ruling was brief and unsigned.
Fast thinking, fast work
None of these emergency decisions are final. In each, lawyers can fight the policy in lower courts. Perhaps the Supreme Court will eventually decide that the government can’t deport migrants from around the world to Sudan or unmake a federal agency without the say-so of Congress. But by then, critics of the shadow docket say, the work will already be done.
The justices themselves have battled over the propriety of emergency rulings. In a 2021 dissent, Elana Kagan rued a midnight ruling that effectively overturned Roe v. Wade in Texas. A month later, Samuel Alito returned fire in a speech:
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. … You can’t expect the E.M.T.s 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.
Some law professors have built a new database tracking the rise of the emergency docket. The first half of 2025 represented a record high, with 15 emergency applications accepted as of June 18. The next highest peak was 11, from the final year of the previous Trump administration.
A Senate Vote
Early this morning, the Senate approved a White House request to cancel about $8 billion in funding for foreign aid and $1 billion for public broadcasting. Congress had previously authorized the spending.
This matters to the aid programs and local news outlets that rely on that money. But it also matters because the Constitution gives Congress the “power of the purse” — the power to decide what the government spends. By bowing to Trump’s request, Republicans made the rare choice to cede that power.