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Watchdog Fears Supreme Court Will Continue to ‘Rubber-Stamp’ Authoritarian Trump Actions in New Term
Accountable.US executive director Tony Carrk said the Supreme Court has "regularly abetted President Trump’s unlawful power grab and indulged his anti-constitutional impulses."
Oct 02, 2025
With a new term kicking off for the US Supreme Court on Monday, an anti-corruption watchdog group is sounding the alarm about several cases that may "rubber-stamp" President Donald Trump's attempts to further erode the rule of law and consolidate more authority over the federal government.
In a statement published Thursday, Tony Carrk, the executive director of the group Accountable.US warned that during Trump's first nine months in power, the high court's 6-3 conservative majority has "regularly abetted President Trump’s unlawful power grab and indulged his anti-constitutional impulses, which has enriched himself, his family, and his wealthy allies at the expense of everyday Americans while eroding our rights, freedoms, and protections."
He fears the court may do so again as it hands down new, highly consequential rulings. Some cases it plans to decide in the new term will determine whether Trump can use emergency powers to enact tariffs without Congress' approval and fire heads of independent federal agencies, including Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook, without cause.
These cases are all on the latest so-called "shadow docket," by which the court issues emergency rulings without providing a public rationale for its decisions. Since his second term began, Trump has flooded the shadow docket with an unprecedented number of cases.
Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck found that in just the first 20 weeks of Trump’s second term, the administration sought emergency action by the court 19 times—the same number of requests made by the Biden administration over four years.
"On issues ranging from dismantling the Department of Education to banning transgender people from serving in the military, federal trial judges from across the ideological spectrum have repeatedly blocked actions by the administration, only for the Supreme Court to halt those rulings with little or no explanation," explained Alicia Bannon, the director of the judiciary program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
Adam Bonica, a political science professor at Stanford University, described the Supreme Court as being "in open conflict with the lower courts over cases involving the Trump administration." Between May 1 and June 23, he found, "federal district courts... ruled against the administration 94.3% of the time. The Supreme Court, however, has flipped that outcome, siding with the administration in 93.7% of its cases (15 out of 16)."
Carrk noted that these new cases "come on the heels of the court’s decision in Trump v. United States last year, which granted Trump broad immunity for unchecked abuses of power at the highest levels of government. This considerable expansion of presidential power arguably emboldened him to take even more extreme, accelerated actions."
Trump is also expected to add other cases to the shadow docket as the term progresses. On Sunday, ABC reported that Trump has requested that the court make an expedited decision on his order ending the constitutional protection of birthright citizenship.
The conservative justices signaled that they may be sympathetic to overturning birthright citizenship when they ruled in June that lower courts could not issue nationwide injunctions to stop its enforcement. Since then, three more federal judges have ruled the order unconstitutional.
The new term will come as the American public increasingly doubts the Supreme Court's evenhandedness. A Gallup poll published Wednesday found that 43% of Americans believe that the court is "too conservative." While this was the highest proportion ever recorded, it has held roughly steady since 2022, when the court overturned Roe v. Wade, which has allowed many states to severely restrict or outright ban abortion.
Approval of the court has plummeted more generally over the past five years. In 2020, just two months before the death of the liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 58% of Americans approved of the job the Supreme Court was doing. Now just 42% say they approve of the court, just slightly up from the 39% nadir recorded in July, which was the lowest level of support the court had received in Gallup's 25-year trend.
"As the court’s new term kicks off, Carrk concluded, all eyes will be on its conservative majority to show that they’re capable of standing up for our rights, freedoms, and the Constitution, or they will further risk undermining their legitimacy and waning trust among the American public."
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Trump Voter ID Threat Condemned as 'Unconstitutional'
"The Constitution gives this authority to the states and Congress, not you!" said the head of Democracy Defenders Fund, threatening a lawsuit.
Sep 01, 2025
US President Donald Trump continued his "authoritarian takeover of our election system" over the weekend, threatening an executive order requiring every voter to present identification, which experts swiftly denounced as clearly "unconstitutional."
"Voter I.D. Must Be Part of Every Single Vote. NO EXCEPTIONS!" Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform late Saturday. "I Will Be Doing An Executive Order To That End!!! Also, No Mail-In Voting, Except For Those That Are Very Ill, And The Far Away Military. USE PAPER BALLOTS ONLY!!!"
Less than two weeks ago, Trump declared on the platform that "I am going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS, and also, while we're at it, Highly 'Inaccurate,' Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES." He claimed, without evidence, that voting by mail leads to "MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD," and promised to take executive action ahead of the 2026 midterms.
Those posts came as battles over his March executive order (EO), "Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections," are playing out in federal court. The measure was largely blocked by multiple district judges, but the president is appealing.
Trump's voter ID post provoked a new threat of legal action to stop his unconstitutional attacks on the nation's election system.
"Go ahead, make my day Mr. Trump," said Norm Eisen, who co-founded Democracy Defenders Fund and served as White House special counsel for ethics and government reform during the Obama administration.
"We at Democracy Defenders Fund immediately sued you and got an injunction on your first voting EO," he noted. "We will do the same here if you try it again. The Constitution gives this authority to the states and Congress, not you!"
In addition to pointing out that Trump is "an absentee voter himself," Democracy Docket explained Sunday that "the US Constitution gives the states the primary authority to regulate elections, while empowering Congress to 'at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.' The Framers never considered authorizing the president to oversee elections."
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures: "Thirty-six states have laws requesting or requiring voters to show some form of identification at the polls. The remaining 14 states and Washington, DC use other methods to verify the identity of voters."
Those laws already prevent Americans from participating in elections, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.
"Overly burdensome photo ID requirements block millions of eligible American citizens from voting," the center's voter ID webpage says. "As many as 11% of eligible voters do not have the kind of ID that is required by states with strict ID requirements, and that percentage is even higher among seniors, minorities, people with disabilities, low-income voters, and students."
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Trump May 'Fabricate a National Emergency' to Extend DC Takeover Without Congressional Support
"Emergency powers are the lifeblood of authoritarians," said a former Republican congressman.
Aug 14, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump suggested Wednesday he may declare a national emergency to circumvent Congress and continue his military occupation of Washington, D.C. indefinitely.
Under the Home Rule Act, the president is allowed to unilaterally take control of law enforcement in the nation's capital for 30 days. After that, Congress must extend its authorization through a joint resolution.
The authorization would need 60 votes to break the Senate filibuster, meaning some Democrats would need to sign on. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has said there's "no fucking way" they would, adding that some Republicans would likely vote against it as well.
During a speech at the Kennedy Center on Wednesday, Trump said that if Congress won't approve his indefinite deployment of the National Guard, he'll just invoke emergency powers.
"If it's a national emergency, we can do it without Congress, but we expect to be before Congress very quickly," Trump said.
"I don't want to call a national emergency," Trump said, before adding, "If I have to, I will."
Announcing his federal takeover of the D.C. police, Trump said he would authorize the cops to "do whatever the hell they want" when patrolling the city.
On Wednesday, a day after troops deployed to D.C., federal agents set up a security checkpoint on the busy 14th Street Northwest Corridor, where Newsweek reports that they have been conducting random stops, which have previously been ruled unconstitutional.
One eyewitness described seeing agents "in unmarked cars without badges pulling people out of their cars and taking them away."
Other similar scenes of what appear to be random and arbitrary stops and arrests have been documented around the city.
"President Trump fabricated the 'emergency' that's required to exist for a president to federalize D.C. Police," said Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia's nonvoting congressional delegate on X. "He admitted to reporters today that he's willing to fabricate a national emergency in order to try to extend his power."
It would not be the first time Trump called a national emergency in an attempt to suspend the usual checks on his power.
In 2019—despite border crossings being at historic lows—he declared a national emergency to reroute billions of dollars to construct his border wall after Congress refused to approve it. He has also declared a national emergency at the U.S. border.
He has used national emergency declarations even more liberally in his second term, including to send U.S. troops to the Southern border, to expedite oil drilling projects, and to enact extreme tariffs without congressional approval.
According to Joseph Nunn, a legal scholar at the Brennan Center for Justice, Trump is already abusing the language of the Home Rule Act, which only allows D.C. law enforcement to be federalized in "special conditions of an emergency nature."
Though the law does not explicitly define what constitutes a "national emergency," Nunn says, "the word 'emergency' has meaning. An emergency is a sudden crisis, an unexpected change in circumstances." That would be at odds with the facts on the ground in D.C., where crime has fallen dramatically over the past year.
After Trump floated using a national emergency to extend his occupation of D.C., Justin Amash—a former Republican congressman who was ousted in 2021 after breaking with Trump—wrote on X that "emergency powers are the lifeblood of authoritarians."
"Once established in law, they're nearly impossible to revoke because a president can veto any bill curtailing the power," Amash said. "We always live under dozens of active 'national emergencies,' almost none of which are true emergencies."
Trump also said he was working with congressional Republicans on a "crime bill" that will "pertain initially to D.C." but will be expanded to apply to other blue cities like Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Despite Trump's portrayal of these cities as crime-ridden hellscapes, crime is falling in every single one of them.
"What Donald Trump is doing is, in some ways, a dress rehearsal for going after others around the country. And I think we need to stop this—certainly by the end of the 30 days," said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). "This should never have started, so I definitely want to make sure it doesn't continue."
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