Supreme Court's emergency docket delivers Trump string of wins as final tests loom

Those victories are, however, temporary. The upcoming term, which begins Monday, will allow the justices to begin weighing the full merits of some of these court disputes and ultimately cement or undo key parts of the Trump agenda.

Jonathan Adler, a William & Mary Law School professor, attributed the interim wins to the Supreme Court's desire to narrow the judicial branch's role in policymaking.

Speaking during a Federalist Society panel this week, Adler said the high court's thinking might be that "lower courts are doing too much. We're going to scale that back because it's not our place, and it's for the executive branch and the legislative branch to figure that out."

He acknowledged that some might have a different view, that the Trump administration has been "too muscular" and that court intervention is a necessary check.

The emergency docket, sometimes known as the shadow or interim docket, allows the Trump administration or plaintiffs to ask the Supreme Court to quickly intervene in lawsuits and temporarily pause lower court rulings. The process can take a couple of days, weeks or months, and is viewed as a much speedier, albeit temporary, way to secure court relief than when the high court fully considers the merits of a case, which can include a long briefing schedule and oral arguments.

The Supreme Court's emergency docket this year has been extraordinarily active. Attorney Kannon Shanmugam, who has argued dozens of cases before the high court, said Trump's high volume of executive actions is partly the reason for that.

"[An increase in emergency motions] coincides with the rise of executive orders and other forms of unilateral executive action really as the primary form of lawmaking in our country with the disappearance of Congress, and that has posed enormous challenges for the court," Shanmugam said during the panel.

In other instances, parties on both sides have construed Supreme Court outcomes as wins.

In one such order, the Supreme Court said the Trump administration must attempt to return Salvadoran migrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the government admitted in court to improperly deporting to a Salvadoran prison. But at the same time, the high court noted that district court judges must also be deferential to the executive branch's authority over foreign policy.

Conservative lawyer Carrie Severino, president of the legal watchdog JCN, told Fox News Digital one criterion the Supreme Court considers when making fast decisions is whether parties are at risk of irreparable harm.

As an example, Severino pointed to the Supreme Court recently allowing Trump to fire Biden-appointed FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, a case that the high court is now using as a vehicle to revisit in the coming months the 90-year precedent set by Humphrey's Executor v. United States.

Severino said, "If one assumes, 'Okay, if Trump's right,' then this is a serious burden on the government to have a good chunk of their four years being taken up with not being able to actually staff the government as they want to. If Trump's wrong, then Commissioner Slaughter should have been in that position, and they can remedy that by providing her back pay."

"When you're balancing those types of harms, this is the kind of case where the government's going to have a leg up," Severino said.

The Supreme Court's majority has often split along ideological lines and offered little reason for its emergency decisions. This differs from final orders from the court, which can be lengthy and include numerous concurring opinions and dissents.

"As cases reach the court on the merits, we shouldn't presume that the administration will win them all," Mizer said.