The former is literally the real legal system, nothing shadow about it. Shadow would be some hidden deal to drop charges or something.
It's also not DDOS when a huge part of what you call "real" is exactly the same, so not unwillingly overloaded but willingly complicit.
Trump is winning most of these fights in the appellate courts and the Supreme Court. Activist groups are flooding the system with a bunch of weak cases, getting weak, poorly reasoned district court rulings, then getting overturned on appeal.
> Activist groups are flooding the system with a bunch of weak cases, getting weak, poorly reasoned district court rulings, then getting overturned on appeal.
Trump's > 90% success rate at the Supreme Court should be read as an indictment of the Supreme Court, not of the lower courts.
On the law, the rulings are correct. Article II, Section 2, cl. 1: "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." QED. The contrary "precedents" were ginned up to support Woodrow Wilson's racist fever-dream of an executive run by "expert" civil servants instead of the elected President: https://ballotpedia.org/%22The_Study_of_Administration%22_by.... I remember sitting in Con Law class and reading these cases thinking how obviously wrong they all were. I couldn't even dream that we would ever be able to clean out this horse stable!
> preferring to instead punt the issue and allow the harm to continue, completely circumventing the merits of the cases.
That's because almost all of the rulings coming up to the Supreme Court were preliminary injunctions where the lower court made no determination of the merits.
> making the bizarre claim that enjoining the Executive Branch from doing whatever it wants pending a full trial harms it in greater proportion than the harms being actually inflicted on ordinary people.
Read Marbury v. Madison and look at how much ink Justice Marshall spends trying to avoid enjoining the Secretary of State to do something as ministerial as delivering an already-signed letter. He literally invented judicial review in an effort to avoid that result. Think about how Marshall's lengthy analysis of how courts can't enjoin discretionary actions of the President would apply to the sweeping injunctions being handed out these days.
McMahon v. New York is obviously correct. A preliminary injunction is an “extraordinary and drastic” remedy requiring a showing that the plaintiff is likely to succeed in the merits: https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/civil-resource-manual-21.... The argument that federal courts can supervise a reduction in force where the individual firings aren’t themselves illegal (e.g. race based) is a tenuous argument. Besides, what’s the irreparable harm? Being fired is one of the classic examples of something that can be remedied by after a trial with reinstatement and backpay.
With regards to McMahon v. New York, what makes you think that the plaintiff is unlikely to succeed in the merits? The court can absolutely take into consideration the intent of the Trump administration and McMahon as his secretary to illegally shutter the Department of Education. On the one hand, you have the executive branch's ability to oversee a reduction in force; on the other, you have the executive reducing force as an end-run around the duty charged to them by law. If the "unitary executive theory" means that the executive can discharge duties they are bound by law to execute, then the Constitution is meaningless (as Sotomayor cites at the very beginning of her dissent, Article 2 section 3 charges the President to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed"). Your argument that irreparable harm extends only to the staff being fired is also naively narrow; the states brought the suit, not the staff of the DoEd. The states argue--correctly--that if the Department cannot carry out its duties, then a vast array of students and teachers that rely on services funded or administered by the DoEd would be harmed. It seems batshit to argue that the harms done to the executive by temporarily curtailing that power outweigh the harms that will be done to an uncertain but certainly vast number of people in the interim. It's worth noting that, in this case, providing relief simply means that the government must maintain the status quo for a few months or however long it takes for the case to work through the courts. Restoring someone's job with back pay is sufficient when one person is fired. It is not sufficient when the executive has eliminated 50% of a statutorily-mandated department of the federal government with an eye to cut more.