Mother Jones illustration; Charly Triballeau/Pool Photo/AP; Valerie Plesch/DPA/Zuma

Last week, the Supreme Court ended a term unlike any other. The Roberts Court, with its 6-3 majority of Republican appointees, continued to issue partisan opinions that pleased the wealthy interests that fund the conservative legal movement while abetting the new Trump administration on its lawless rampage against immigrants, federal agencies, Congress, the courts, and natural born citizens. With the decisions now laid out, a clear pattern emerges: The court is increasingly solicitous of the political coalition that created its rightwing majority—as well as the court’s own power over the rest of the government.

“No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates.”

Once President Donald Trump took office on January 20, the justices’ work split along two parallel tracks. The first, called the merits docket, encompasses the normal business of the court—which for this court is doing the work of the billionaires and industry titans whose largess helped the conservative majority win its seats. The second track, the emergency docket, is where the court acts as the final mediator of Donald Trump’s unlawful power grabs—power clashes that the Republican-appointed justices have repeatedly called in Trump’s favor. This docket is also derisively called the shadow docket, because the justices not only make these decisions quickly, but with little or no explanation. Thus, this is the executive power track.

These parallel tracks reflect the two sides of the Republican Party’s coalition: The traditional constituents of big business and conservative Christians on one side, and Trump’s newer MAGA movement on the other. On the merits docket, the Roberts Court continues at breakneck speed to dismantle the administrative agencies and laws that regulate industry while abetting the project of Christian nationalism. On the shadow docket, the GOP appointees oblige Trump’s power grabs.

The two tracks are not entirely separate, but mutually reinforcing. Both share a disdain for Congress’ role in our system of government while prioritizing the prerogatives of the president, wealthy interests, and rightwing Christian interest groups. And so these parallel tracks have, in recent months, converged.

They also mutually reinforce the awkward political marriage that created this Supreme Court, between the powerful business interests and the religious extremists who, in joining up with Trump’s MAGA movement, forged an alliance that rewarded and kept both camps happy, facilitating their continued cooperation. Again and again, on both tracks, it is democracy that loses out to opportunism as the court seeks to hand party favors to all but the people who need their protection.

Michael Podhorzer, the former political guru for the AFL-CIO, has described how the Roberts Court often supplants “democratic legal principles” with what he terms rule-by-fiat, an “outcome-driven jurisprudence that disingenuously changes the law to accomplish outcomes that favor specific interests.” As Podhorzer tells it, “once cases reach the Rule-by-Fiat system, outcomes follow power relations rather than legal principles.” The best way to understand the court’s actions this year is through this Rule-by-Fiat framework. 

Consider the justices’ track record in the last weeks of its term. According to Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica, between May 1 and June 23, lower courts ruled against Trump 94 percent of the time. In that same window, the Supreme Court ruled for the administration 94 percent of the time.

The shadow docket allows the justices to order change simply because they say so.

Traditionally, the Supreme Court begins each term in the first week of October and wraps up by the end of June, when multiple justices wing off to Europe on plum teaching junkets, cruise on billionaires’ yachts, or fly private jets to Alaska fishing expeditions—the spoils of their all-powerful position in government. Cases on this merits docket, many of which are handed out in the Supreme Court’s final weeks of term, have marinated in the lower courts, where district courts have fleshed out the facts and appellate courts have rendered their analysis—though those lower courts are increasingly shaped by the same special interests that indulge the justices in their fancy vacations and other perks. The justices read rounds of briefs, receive input from interested parties, hear oral arguments, and then make a final decision. These cases are generally the biggest of the term, and the focus of press reports.

But this year, the court’s regular business was overshadowed by its shadow docket. Throughout the year, the justices consider emergency applications—requests for the highest court to intervene before a case has worked its way up through lower courts and is ready for a full merits decision by the justices. In the past 10 years, this emergency or shadow docket has grown in both size and importance. Increasingly, the Republican-appointed majority is using these emergency appeals to render important legal decisions and intervene on behalf of partisan allies. They do this in the proverbial shadows, skipping over the normal deliberative process and often sharing no justification for their actions. Rather than release considered opinions, the shadow docket allows the justices to order change simply because they say so.

Since President Donald Trump’s swearing in five months ago, the shadow docket has exploded with the most vital cases on the very basic questions of liberty and the rule of law: Can the president deport

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