Since President Trump’s return to office, left-wing activists have filed a multitude of lawsuits challenging the administration’s policies across Democrat-dominated district courts. The primary purpose of this lawfare is to generate favorable rulings and injunctions from rogue judges to stop the enforcement of the president’s agenda.
But there’s also a secondary mission embedded in this judicial coup that is rarely discussed. That is, the left’s effort to delegitimize and destroy the American people’s faith in the U.S. Supreme Court.
While the media and other Democrats have been smearing the court’s conservative justices with bogus hit pieces and ethics probes for years, their allies’ lawfare against Trump 2.0 presents them with another avenue to cast a dishonest cloud of impropriety over the high court.
This could not be truer than it is when it comes to the Supreme Court’s emergency docket, an issue recently debated by Associate Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Unlike the merits docket, in which cases are heard and decided by SCOTUS after being fully litigated in the lower courts, the emergency (or “interim”) docket deals with cases that are still undergoing consideration by lower courts.
When it comes to the lawfare against the Trump administration, numerous activist district and appeals court judges have granted left-wing litigants’ requests to issue overreaching injunctions blocking the government’s policies from taking effect. This has all but forced Trump and his team to seek relief at the Supreme Court’s emergency docket.
In many such cases, a majority of the justices (often along ideological lines) have granted the administration’s requests to temporarily stay (“pause”) these injunctions while litigation continues in the lower courts. These decisions — which often come with little legal explanation to avoid a “lock-in effect” — are not final verdicts on the merits of the cases but are preliminary judgments that target specific lower court actions until these matters can be fully litigated.
As previously noted by Kavanaugh and fellow Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the court can’t refrain from ruling on emergency docket applications. They must decide whether to grant or reject them.
It’s here where Democrats and their allies have cranked their anti-SCOTUS smear campaign up to 11.
Often deploying the term “shadow docket” to conjure up a veil of wrongdoing, leftists have attacked the Republican appointees for siding with Trump in most interim docket cases. They argue that the interim-based rulings are definitive proof that the court is just a partisan rubber stamp for the president, whom they cast as an authoritarian dictator who’s disregarding the rule of law.
See how this little game works?
Leftists file a ton of lawsuits against Trump in district courts dominated by Democrat appointees. These left-wing judges then issue overreaching injunctions and temporary restraining orders blocking the president’s policy and practically forcing him to seek relief from the Supreme Court. When the high court inevitably nukes the lower courts’ activism, leftists cry foul and repeatedly claim that it’s more evidence of SCOTUS being in Trump’s back pocket.
For good measure, legacy outlets like NBC News will then conduct polling about the public’s confidence in the Supreme Court to measure how effective their propaganda operation was. If the numbers give them the narrative they’re looking for, headlines like “Poll: Confidence in the Supreme Court drops to a record low” get blared out across the media landscape, giving Democrats and their activists even more ammo to attack the conservative justices.
But the left still gets its way if the Supreme Court rules against the administration.
Should a majority of justices reject the administration’s request for emergency relief — which has happened on rare occasions — then the lower court blockade on that specific Trump policy is permitted to continue indefinitely. Which provides leftists the outcome they were looking for.
In essence, it’s all one big perpetual game of “Heads I win, tails you lose.”
The Supreme Court has largely done a good job of rejecting public pressures and appropriately ruling on emergency docket applications as they come. And they must continue to do so in the face of leftists’ latest smear tactics.
Democrats and their allies are doing everything in their power to destroy the Supreme Court’s credibility because it’s one of the few institutions they don’t control. And they would love nothing more than for some of the Republican appointees to surrender proper jurisprudence in order to satisfy their disingenuous critics. To do so would arguably do more to wreck the Supreme Court’s integrity than the left’s attack campaign ever could.
