1/ So this is the start of a group of threads that I am going to call the anti-democracy threads and they will explain what practices are anti-democratic in our country and one of these things is the "shadow docket".

2/ For those that are not familiar at the shadow docket is basically a group of decisions that happens in the Supreme Court that doesn’t follow procedural rules of
oral arguments and that often does not have the decisions explained.

3/ There are no opinions written when a decision is issued and often times it will overturn an appellate court decision without explaining the reasoning behind it. Trump for example has actually been a beneficiary of several of these.

4/ Shadow docket decisions, for example, are often ones involving immigrants.

5/ A particularly egregious example of a shadow docket decision which was 5-4 had to do with the lower court finding that California prisons were not taking enough steps to protect their inmates from COVID and that's why an outbreak in the prison happened.

6/ Regardless of the fact that the appellate court did indeed find that the prisons were at fault, the shadow docket decision completely overturned this.

7/ The problem is that in the shadow docket overall, which is a term that was coined by William Baude from the University of Chicago, is basically as he called it “a range of orders in summary decisions that divide the courts normal procedural regularity”

8/ Normal Scotus proceedings are oral arguments and then opinions and dissents. You do not see this with a shadow docket. And with the shadow docket they are often overturning these appellate court decisions but not releasing an opinion.

9/ By not releasing an opinion they are not allowing future cases to be influenced by the decision in the case that they decided to rule on, however, they are exhibiting activism on the court.

10/ So in essence, what they are doing is helping whoever it is that they decide in favor of without adding to stare decisis.

11/ This has become a big problem over the years.

12/ Often shadow docket cases happen in emergency request hearings, so you're seeing a lot of these with the last-minute voter suppression decisions that are happening all around the country and they're asking the court to block a lower order

13/ which would have said “no this is anti- Democratic. No you cannot do this.”
And they just release the decision without the public knowing anything about the thought process involved. We don't know anything about what the actual official opinion of the majority is.

14/ Maybe we have a dissent if we're lucky but really these are decisions that are released usually on a Friday evening and they are released with almost zero information.
This is why they're extremely dangerous, they're extremely dangerous to democracy.

15/ The Trump admin again has had an extremely high win rate in shadow docket cases because the judges do not have to explain their reasoning in any way. They can just block the lower court order if they have a majority vote.

16/ So this, again, is just extremely dangerous to democracy. Court dissents help the public understand the logic of the people that voted against a decision, but you are more often than not ever going to see the logic that went into favoring the side that won.

17/ When you consider that versus what we know about normal cases like Roe and Brown and Loving, you have to understand that understanding the thinking of the court is absolutely vital to our democracy because it is vital to the way that judges conduct themselves

18/ and they always consider stare decisis in their rulings. So not only is this anti-democratic, it's judicial activism of the worst degree and is something that absolutely must be abolished.

RT this to hell. It’s so important