John Oliver Says Trump Uses Shadow Docket as Go-To Tool
john oliver said Donald Trump has turned the Supreme Court’s shadow docket into his go-to method to get his way. On Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, he argued that emergency rulings have helped accelerate Trump’s agenda while cases are still moving through lower courts.
Five Votes, Nine Justices
Five votes among the Supreme Court’s nine justices are enough to grant a request for the court to intervene, and Oliver said that request has to show “irreparable harm” if it is not granted. He compared the process to a football referee saying, “Pending a final ruling on the legality of the quarterback having a gun, I’m just going to stand back and see where he’s going with this.”
Oliver said that setup lets litigants sidestep the usual legal process by asking for a temporary ruling. He added that the court used to step in mainly in extreme emergencies, such as delaying an execution when new case details emerged, not as a routine way to fast-track a president’s agenda.
Trump’s Last Year
In the last year alone, shadow docket decisions allowed the 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 $4bn in congressionally approved foreign aid. Oliver said that in his second term, Trump has appealed to the shadow docket a record number of times.
“But Trump’s now using the shadow docket for a lot more than just death penalty cases,” Oliver said. “If a lower court issues a ruling 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.”
Noem v Vasquez Perdomo
Oliver also pointed to the 2025 Noem v Vasquez Perdomo case, where the Supreme Court’s shadow docket paused a lower court’s injunction that had limited the ability of ICE agents to stop and question people based on racial profiling. At the time, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said he reached that conclusion because such ICE stops were “typically brief”.
That is the part worth watching: emergency relief is no longer limited to rare crisis calls, and the people feeling the effect are university recipients, transgender service members, federal workers, and aid programs tied to $4bn in approved spending. Oliver’s view was blunt — “This strategy is paying off” — and the court’s next emergency order will show whether that trend keeps holding.
