#shadow docket

[liberalsarecool]

SCOTUS is a hyper-partisan GOP special interest group.

The least impartial hacks imaginable.

[onlytiktoks]

[saywhat-politics]

The Roberts-Trump feud is a distraction — Supreme Court already handed him the keys: Slate

While the public has been focused on the occasional high-profile clash between President Donald Trump and the Supreme Court, the court's con

While the public has been focused on the occasional high-profile clash between President Donald Trump and the Supreme Court, the court's conservative supermajority has been quietly using the shadow docket to hand Trump something far more consequential — effective control of the federal government — and legal analysts say that work is now largely complete.

That is the central argument of a new piece by Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern in Slate, who say the popular narrative of a principled Chief Justice John Roberts standing up to Trump conceals a far more troubling reality.

[joe-england]

The Shadow Docket: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

[hezigler]

The Shadow Docket: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

[galerymod]

📑 The Roy Cohn DNA: How a 1970s Mafia Attorney Programmed Donald Trump’s Entire Career

To understand why Donald Trump views the U.S. Constitution, international treaties, and federal judges not as sacred pillars of democracy, but as minor speedbumps, you have to stop looking at modern political science. You must look at his biography.

The strategy deployed from the Oval Office is the literal, hyper-scaled continuation of a ruthless boardroom playbook designed fifty years ago in the smoke-filled restaurants of Manhattan. Its architect was Roy Cohn—the notorious, brilliant, and deeply unprincipled attorney who served as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the 1950s Red Scare, defended New York’s most powerful Mafia bosses (like Fat Tony Salerno and John Gotti), and became young Donald Trump’s ultimate ideological programmer in 1973 [🔍].

From 1973 until today, Trump’s entire public and political existence has been a flawless execution of the Roy Cohn Playbook. It is a lifelong methodology of calculated chaos, aggressive lawlessness, and systemic gaslighting.

🧱 1. The Core Doctrines of the Cohn Playbook

Roy Cohn taught Trump that the legal system is not an instrument of justice; it is an arena of pure combat. The script consists of four immutable laws that Trump has deployed relentlessly across five decades:

Rule 1: Never Settle, Never Apologize 🚫: Admissions of error are viewed as fatal weaknesses. If you are caught red-handed, double down.

Rule 2: Counter-Attack Instantly ⚔️: If someone sues or investigates you, immediately sue them back, attack their character, and destroy their credibility in the press before the case ever reaches a courtroom.

Rule 3: Delay and Overload the System ⏳: Flood the courts with endless motions, appeals, and procedural technicalities. Overload the judicial machinery until the opponent runs out of money or the judge surrenders to exhaustion.

Rule 4: Shape Your Own Reality 🔮: Truth is not an objective fact; it is a transactional variable. If you repeat a fabrication with absolute confidence and aggressive frequency, it becomes reality for your followers.

📅 The Chronological Execution: 1970s to Today

To see the terrifying consistency of this DNA, we only need to map how Trump applied Cohn’s lessons across his entire public life, transforming a local real estate tactic into a tool for national transformation:

🏢 The 1970s: The Birth of Defiance (The DOJ Housing Case)

In 1973, the U.S. Department of Justice sued the Trump Management Corporation for systematically discriminating against Black apartment applicants. Most business owners would have quietly settled to protect their brand.

The Cohn Move: Trump hired Roy Cohn. Instead of settling, Cohn launched a massive $100 million counter-suit against the federal government, accusing the DOJ of "Gestapo tactics." While the counter-suit was swiftly dismissed, the aggressive delay allowed Trump to eventually sign a consent decree two years later with zero admission of guilt. Trump learned that bullying the federal government works.

🎰 The 1980s: Stiffing Subcontractors & Casino Chaos

Throughout his rise as a Manhattan real estate mogul and Atlantic City casino owner, Trump perfected the art of contractual attrition. He routinely hired local carpenters, plumbers, and architects to build projects like the Taj Mahal, waited for the work to be completed, and then refused to pay them, or offered 30 cents on the dollar.

The Cohn Move: When the ruined small businesses sued, Trump utilized Cohn’s exhaustion strategy. His legal teams dragged out the litigation for years. Independent contractors went bankrupt waiting for their day in court, forcing them to accept predatory settlements. Lawlessness became highly profitable.

📺 The 1990s & 2000s: The Weaponization of the Tabloids & Reality TV

When his Atlantic City empire collapsed into massive corporate bankruptcies in the early 1990s, Trump should have been financially ruined.

The Cohn Move: Applying the doctrine of shaping your own reality, Trump flooded the New York tabloids (and later, reality television with The Apprentice) with an aggressive narrative of supreme billionaire success. By weaponizing the press, he decoupled his public image from his actual financial failures, proving that controlled media narratives are more powerful than economic facts.

🏛️ The 2010s & 2020s: Scaling the Playbook to the Presidency

When Trump entered politics, the world watched in shock as he shattered every norm of American governance. In reality, he was simply applying the 1970s Manhattan real estate blueprint to the leader of the free world.

The Mueller Investigation & Impeachments: When investigated for foreign election interference or constitutional overreach, Trump didn't cooperate. He counter-attacked the investigators as "corrupt deep-state actors," delayed procedures via endless executive privilege claims, and repeated the phrase "Witch Hunt" until the public suffered from outrage fatigue.

The 2020 Election Denial: When he lost the election, he ran the ultimate Roy Cohn script: deny the reality, launch dozens of chaotic lawsuits to stress-test the system, and manufacture an alternative truth that culminated in the January 6th Capitol riot.

🚨 Today: Total Executive Immunity and Institutional Capture

The culmination of this lifelong methodology has reached its peak. The administration treats judicial constraints as optional suggestions [🔍].

The Modern Execution: When lower federal courts strike down unlawful executive decrees, the administration simply bypasses them via the Supreme Court's unreasoned Shadow Docket or instructs agencies like ICE to ignore richterliche injunctions completely [🔍, 🔍]. By implementing Schedule F to purge independent experts from federal watchdog agencies, the executive has scaled Cohn's tactic of destroying the referee to its absolute, terrifying conclusion [🔍].

🏁 The Final Verdict

Donald Trump is not a traditional politician who can be contained by fact-checkers, legal precedents, or constitutional definitions of truth. His entire 50-year biography is a continuous, highly successful triumph over the written law.

He does not respect the rules of democracy because Roy Cohn taught him that the rules are the greatest vulnerability of those who try to enforce them. The structural chaos, the endless stream of fabrications, and the systemic defiance of the courts on the nightly news are not signs of a system malfunction; it is the algorithm of a corporate hostile takeover operating exactly as designed by an old Mafia lawyer half a century ago.

👁️ A Crucial Lesson in Mentorship:"History reminds us that learning from the absolute best in a field does not mean they ever intended to teach you how to do good—sometimes, the most brilliant teachers are simply masters of the dark, training their disciples not to build a better world, but to dismantle it with flawless efficiency." 🎭♟️

mod

[rjzimmerman]

The birth of the Supreme Court’s shadow docket has long been a mystery. (New York Times)

I just learned that this shadow docket crap started with a 2016 ruling by the US Supreme Court that "temporarily" blocked President Obama's Clean Power Plan as the underlying legal issues were litigated. The New York Times story clearly demonstrates the bias of chief justice roberts and justice alito against climate-related policies, and the timidity of the four justices who were considered the "liberal bloc."

Here's a summary of this New York Times story from Esquire:

Over the weekend, The New York Times published a trove of personal memos from the members of the Supreme Court outlining the court’s promiscuous use of the so-called shadow docket. It has become the carefully constructed conservative majority’s favorite work-around to kill policies it doesn’t like and support causes that it and its corporate patrons do.

The report is an astonishing leak of private communications between the justices. It bespeaks a court at war with itself, completely out of the control of Chief Justice John Roberts. The best evidence of the latter contention is the fact that Roberts emerges from these memos as a complete hack. The Times traces the invigorated shadow docket back to when Roberts used it to block an environmental program from President Barack Obama.

For two centuries, the court had generally handled major cases at a stately pace that encouraged care and deliberation, relying on written briefs, oral arguments and in-person discussions. The justices composed detailed opinions that explained their thinking to the public and rendered judgment only after other courts had weighed in.

But this time, the justices were sprinting to block a major presidential initiative. By a 5-to-4 vote along partisan lines, the order halted President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, his signature environmental policy. They acted before any other court had addressed the plan’s lawfulness. The decision consisted of only legal boilerplate, without a word of reasoning. At the time, the ruling seemed like a curious one-off. But that single paragraph turned out to be a sharp and lasting break.

That night marks the birth, many legal experts believe, of the court’s modern “shadow docket,” the secretive track that the Supreme Court has since used to make many major decisions, including granting President Trump more than 20 key victories on issues from immigration to agency power.

This is where Roberts comes in.

In public, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has cultivated a reputation for care and caution. The papers reveal a different side of him. At a critical moment for the country and the court, the papers show, he acted as a bulldozer in pushing to stop Mr. Obama’s plan to address the global climate crisis. When colleagues warned the chief justice that he was proposing an unprecedented move, he was dismissive. “I recognize that the posture of this stay request is not typical,” he wrote. But he argued that the Obama plan, which aimed to regulate coal-fired plants, was “the most expensive regulation ever imposed on the power sector,” and too big, costly and consequential for the court not to act immediately.

Chief Justice Balls ’n’ Strikes seems a bit confused. He’s not supposed to care about the economic impact of a presidential initiative. He’s only supposed to decide whether the initiative itself is constitutional. And, in any case, it’s an issue that deserved to be debated by the full court in open session.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Our Cynical Supreme Court

This is what a captured Court looks like.

Terry Moran at Real Patriotism:

The masks are slipping at the Supreme Court. Last week, two revelations peeled back the institutional facade of the Roberts Court and exposed what many Americans have long suspected: our Supreme Court has been captured by partisans who are using its unaccountable power to reshape the country in the image of the Trump-Republican Party. The first revelation came from the stunning reporting of The New York Times, which obtained secret memos from inside the Court. The memos tell a behind-the-scenes story that is both depressing and infuriating. These documents—which the Times made public in what is arguably the biggest scoop in SCOTUS history—shatter the carefully maintained legend of Chief Justice John Roberts as a sober institutionalist, a guardian of judicial independence, a man of caution and care. The memos show a different Roberts—not a referee calling balls and strikes, but a bulldozer in a black robe. In 2016, a huge environmental issue came before the Court. President Obama’s Clean Power Plan sought to reduce carbon emissions in America by way of an executive order, issued by Obama under the provisions of the Clean Air Act of 1990.

[...] Then there is Clarence Thomas. Last Wednesday, the senior Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court delivered an hour-long address at the University of Texas law school that can only be described as a political speech. Thomas declared that progressivism, which he traced to Woodrow Wilson, is fundamentally incompatible with the Declaration of Independence—and warned darkly that the two cannot coexist forever. He linked progressivism to Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao. Anyone to the left of Grover Cleveland, it seems, is a threat to the Republic. The history was fiction. The intent was not. Thomas castigated those in Washington who “fall prey to the enchanting siren songs of flattery” and are “enticed by access to things that were previously unavailable to them.”

[...] Roberts poses as an institutionalist while secretly engineering the Court’s transformation into a political instrument. Thomas rages against corruption while his patron sits in the front row. What Americans feared is now confirmed. Their Supreme Court—lifetime appointments, no elections, no meaningful ethics enforcement—is in the hands of men who see it not as a temple of justice but as a lever of power. The masks are off. The question now is what we intend to do about it.

The MAGA Majority on SCOTUS has done damage to America’s jurisprudence.