That sort of instability is so damaging beyond the boundaries of his term. Hopefully this restores a bit of confidence.
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If we look at how often the justices voted in favour of each administration in emergency applications when the government was the filer, we get Sotomayor and Jackson favouring Biden with a 77-point margin (88 to 11 percent and 77 to 0 percent, respectively), Alito favouring Trump with a 77-point margin (95 to 18%), and Kavanaugh, Barrett and Roberts with 48, 26 and 21-point margins [1].
On the whole, Trump has been successful 84% of the time against Biden's 53%. But my point is that the partisan fracture of our court--on the level of individual justices--has been happening for a while. (The fact that we have (a) Alito, who's a hack and (b) a decadelong conservative majority is more explanatory than e.g. Barrett or Roberts having gone to the dark side.)
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/14/us/politics/supreme-court...
Obviously it is impossible to answer this without projecting some bias. But I don't think that makes it unanswerable.
It's really difficult to answer this separate from one's biases.
I'd also note that Trump, then Biden, then Trump again escalated the use of the shadow docket way beyond historical norms [1]. This was a deliberate choice by both Presidents.
> there is something fishy with both sidesing it
Didn't mean to both sides this, at least not at the level of the Court. The Court has had a conservative majority for a decade; one could argue Jackson and Sotomayor are balancing the court by leaning against its centre of pressure. But it's not unexpected for the Court to be a bit more deferential towards a Republican President. We haven't been appointing and confirming neutral arbiters for a while.
The President does not choose to use the shadow docket. The use of the shadow docket is controlled by the court justices, who (as you pointed out) have been a conservative majority for a decade.
You are correct that the use of the shadow docket increased under Trump and then Biden, but this is consistent with the (somewhat obvious) explanation that the conservative justices began to use this tool as a partisan weapon for Trump and the GOP and then later against Biden's policies.
Oh wow, I didn't know this [1]. Thank you...what in the actual fuck.
I'm having trouble parsing how the shadow docket relates to a party requesting emergency relief. Do you have a good source on this?