John Oliver explains how the Supreme Court keeps letting Trump get away with it

It’s called the shadow docket, which is a name at least a couple of the justices have objected to. Amy Coney Barrett prefers “emergency docket,” and Brett Kavanaugh would rather it called the “interim docket.” But whatever you call it, it’s a process that has allowed the Trump administration to remove all transgender people from the military, allow ICE to conduct blatant racial profiling, and other actions that lower courts have previously deemed illegal. The shadow docket is supposed to exist in cases that will cause irreparable harm to one party if a ruling doesn’t happen immediately; for example, the Supreme Court can stay an execution. For years, that’s basically the extent of what it was used for. 

But now the docket is being used when a lower court rules against one of Donald Trump’s executive orders, basically allowing the order to continue without a real legal discussion about it. Barrett is careful to say that these decisions are expected to be temporary, but those temporary decisions can easily cause irreversible harm to the subjects of Trump’s scorn. Oliver highlights the trans people who were banned from the military thanks to the shadow docket who now have no source of income until the legal proceedings reach the Supreme Court yet again. Check out the whole segment below.