The Supreme Court on Friday issued its final decisions in cases argued this term, capping off another year with contentious rulings that split the justices along party lines. Such rulings involving birthright citizenship injunctions, religion in public schools and more are immensely consequential for the country.
But to truly understand the term, we must also take stock of the so-called shadow docket, where the justices decide emergency appeals without first holding hearings and sometimes without explaining themselves at all. Such decisions can come to the court any time and will likely continue over the summer on all sorts of issues — so don’t assume the court will be quiet between now and October when the next term begins.
To understand how significant these cases can be — and were this term — let’s recount five examples. They highlight the Roberts Court’s choices to intervene in favor of a Trump administration that has run roughshod over the law. Even if the court didn’t give the administration everything it wanted in every case, the majority failed to meet the moment in President Donald Trump’s second term.
‘Indefensible’ on the Alien Enemies Act
The Supreme Court broadly upheld due process for Venezuelan immigrants whom Trump wants to ship to a Salvadoran mega-prison (at least going forward, as litigation continues in lower courts over the scores of people already there).
But the majority made the procedures harder for immigrants to secure that due process. That prompted dissent from not only the three Democratic appointees but also from Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett, who partially joined Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent.
“The Government’s conduct in this litigation poses an extraordinary threat to the rule of law,” Sotomayor wrote, calling “indefensible” the majority’s decision to “reward” the government. She concluded, “We, as a Nation and a court of law, should be better than this.”
(Slowly) ‘Facilitating’ Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s return
Like the Alien Enemies Act case, this one also featured the majority rejecting the administration’s most extreme stance, insofar as the court required at least some theoretical baseline of due process. But it’s also like the Alien Enemies Act case in that the majority didn’t go far enough to hold the administration to account.
To be sure, the court unanimously affirmed that officials had to “facilitate” the return of Abrego, whom the administration illegally sent to El Salvador in March. But instead of fully approving a trial judge’s order for his return, the majority vaguely critiqued another aspect of the judge’s order and sent the case back for further litigation. The Democratic appointees issued an accompanying statement explaining why they would’ve fully approved the judge’s order.
The administration’s defiant posture in the weeks that followed shows the wisdom of the minority’s position, which could’ve ended this needless saga sooner, as the administration didn’t get him back until earlier this month.
Boosting Trump’s power while sparing the Federal Reserve
The court effectively overturned a 90-year-old precedent to give presidents the power to fire members of independent federal agencies without cause.
But the majority’s move in the case, involving labor-related agencies, also implicated the Federal Reserve’s independence. In an apparent attempt to shore up the financial markets while expanding presidential power, the majority went out of its way to add a carveout to protect the Federal Reserve from presidential whims, even though this case technically wasn’t about that important economic body.
“If the idea is to reassure the markets, a simpler — and more judicial — approach would have been to deny the President’s application for a stay on the continued authority of Humphrey’s,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent, referring to the 1935 precedent that the majority didn’t even acknowledge that it was ignoring.
Rushing to the scene for DOGE
A federal judge said the administration couldn’t justify granting members of the Elon Musk-backed Department of Government Efficiency access to Americans’ sensitive Social Security data. A federal appeals court declined to disturb that determination.
But the high court majority stepped in to grant the instant relief that lower courts wouldn’t. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson put it in dissent, the court once again “dons its emergency-responder gear, rushes to the scene, and uses its equitable power to fan the flames rather than extinguish them.”
On the same day in a separate case, the majority granted the administration’s emergency bid to keep information about DOGE’s inner workings from being disclosed to a watchdog group in litigation under the Freedom of Information Act.
‘Rewarding lawlessness’ on deportations
Turning back to the themes of immigration and defiance of the courts that have dominated Trump’s second term, a recent shadow docket case combined both issues. Over dissent that accused the majority of “rewarding lawlessness,” the court lifted a judge’s order that had stopped the government from rapidly deporting certain immigrants to countries other than their country of origin.
Sotomayor’s dissent critiqued the court not only for needlessly intervening yet again but for doing so in a case in which the administration had already violated a court order. She said she “cannot join so gross an abuse of the Court’s equitable discretion.”
The majority didn’t explain itself.
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