John Oliver called out the “irreparable, f---ing harm” of the Trump administration’s Supreme Court strategy on Sunday.
On Last Week Tonight, the HBO anchor explained how President Donald Trump has used and “abused” the shadow docket. “The shadow docket has empowered some of Trump’s worst policies to the point it’s now become his go-to method to get his way,” Oliver said.
“The court has been repeatedly jumping into ongoing cases to say, ‘You know what, while this works its way through the courts, Trump should get to do the thing that he wants to do anyway,’” continued the late-night host.
According to NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, the second Trump administration has taken unprecedented use of the shadow docket, or “applications that seek immediate action from the court.” In the past, such applications were used in specific cases that could cause “irreparable harm.” But the Trump administration has turned to this emergency procedure a whopping 41 times in his second term as president.
“Trump’s now using the shadow docket for a lot more than just death penalty cases,” explained Oliver. “Because if a lower court issues a ruling that he doesn’t like, say, pausing an executive action until it’s been fully litigated, he’ll now run to the Supreme Court and ask them to rule in his favor on the shadow docket. And recently, he’s been doing that a lot.”
The administration has done so on “hot button topics,” according to Harvard Law School, such as financial aid, foreign aid, and immigration. In its analysis of this new phenomenon, the law school specifically cited how the administration has used emergency dockets “to expel transgender service members from the military, to permit roving ICE raids to stop citizens and non-citizens alike.”
Oliver echoed this list, saying, “As in the last year alone, the courts issued decisions via the shadow docket that allowed this administration to cut hundreds of millions of dollars worth of grants to universities, dismiss every transgender service member from the military, cut a third of the Department of Education, fire hundreds of thousands of federal employees and refuse to spend $4 billion in congressionally appointed foreign aid.”
“Trump keeps claiming he needs an emergency ruling, and the court keeps agreeing with him,” slammed Oliver.
Oliver outlined the “big problem” in these cases and why he believes it will harm SCOTUS’s reputation.
“What’ll hurt the Supreme Court the most in the long run is that these decisions seem nakedly political. Because it turns out the best predictor of how this court will rule in shadow docket cases seems to be who is president at the time,” he stated. “For instance, the Biden administration brought far fewer cases to the shadow docket and won just over half the time. But the Trump administration, which uses it far, far more, prevails 84 percent of the time.”
The Brennan Center for Law said that this record of shadow dockets is “troubling and damaging.”
Oliver said the Supreme Court “has eroded people’s confidence to the point it’s now considered a political arm instead of a necessary check on political power.”
“And if you ask me, that qualifies as, if I may borrow a phrase, actual, irreparable, f---ing harm.”
