Tracking Trump in Court: The Scope of Executive Power Tested

The Supreme Court is siding overwhelmingly with President Donald Trump when challenges arrive via the emergency docket, a Bloomberg Law analysis found.

The conservative-led high court has ruled in Trump’s favor in challenges to his second term policies more than 75% of the time in the last year, when considering matters before they’ve been fully briefed and argued before the justices.

Trump has taken an expansive view of executive power during his second term, issuing orders upending immigration enforcement, higher education, and the federal workforce.

The justices’ interim orders, greenlighting Trump policies for months or longer while cases are fully considered, may prove irreversible for immigrants facing deportation or terminated federal workers—even if the high court eventually rules differently on the merits.

“They may describe these decisions as temporary. But for many people, and in some instances for everybody, this is it,” said Carolyn Shapiro, the founder and co-director of Chicago-Kent College of Law’s Institute on the Supreme Court of the United States. “There is no more.”

The high court’s interim docket orders in those cases, issued during the 12 months following Trump’s second inauguration, tended to favor the administration regardless of the circuit where the case was initially heard, the analysis shows.

The justice granted requests for relief, at least partially, in 24 out of its 27 Trump-related orders. Most were wins or mixed rulings favoring Trump. But the high court let the underlying court rulings stand in all but three of the 28 orders unrelated to the administration that reached the emergency docket.

The federal appeals court that saw its decisions lifted most often by the justices when they reached the emergency docket, including Trump and non-Trump cases, was the Boston-based US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. It’s followed by the federal appeals courts in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., the data shows.

The grant rates may be explained by the high volume of Trump administration challenges filed in those courts, legal scholars said.

Read More on the emergency docket challenges here.

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Updates with new story on the Supreme Court's recent grants of emergency relief for the Trump administration.