The Supreme Court is now in open conflict with the lower courts over cases involving the Trump administration. Since May, federal district courts have 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).
District court judges, who see the evidence firsthand and hear directly from those affected, overwhelmingly find the administration’s actions unlawful. Circuit courts split more evenly but still lean against the administration. Then the Supreme Court—furthest from facts, closest to power—reverses almost automatically.
The federal judiciary’s multiple levels were designed to handle different types of cases and create orderly paths for appeal, with the Supreme Court as the final arbiter. But that system assumes good faith—that the highest court will exercise its power judiciously, reversing lower courts when they’ve erred, not simply when they rule against executive power.
In National TPS Alliance v. Noem, a district court blocked the administration from terminating Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelan nationals, but the Supreme Court intervened to grant the government a stay, allowing the terminations to proceed. In J.G.G. v. Trump, after a district court issued a temporary restraining order to stop the summary removal of Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act, the Supreme Court again stepped in, vacating the lower court’s order.
The Supreme Court’s intervention in D.V.D. v. DHS exemplifies this pattern. Judge Brian E. Murphy confronted devastating evidence: DHS was deporting people to third countries with hours or minutes of notice, making it impossible to find lawyers or assert claims of persecution. Murphy crafted a narrow remedy—simply requiring advance written notice before deportation. The Supreme Court killed it with an unsigned midnight order, no explanation given. But the message–even left unsaid—was clear.
Federal judges now face coordinated assault from two directions. From the outside, the Trump administration treats court orders as suggestions while targeting judges personally. The president brands them “USA HATING JUDGES” and “MONSTERS.” His allies amplify these attacks into doxxing campaigns, death threats, and impeachment resolutions. From above, the Supreme Court systematically undermines their authority through these emergency reversals. As Justice Sotomayor has pointed out, the government is no longer required to prove its case to win these emergency requests. The Court isn’t correcting clear legal errors; it appears to be punishing lower courts for the act of constraining executive power.
Despite all the protesting-too-much from the Republican majority, this is precisely why the abuse of the shadow docket is so inconsistent with the rule of law in this context. Careful rulings protective of fundamental rights are being casually thrown out with not only no justification for how the balance of equities could favor the government so heavily as to justify an emergency stay but generally no reasoning at all. “Trump wins” is the only rule.
The next step is brutally logical:
Emboldened by the Supreme Court, the administration’s response was swift and unprecedented. On June 24, 2025—just one day after the Supreme Court’s order in D.V.D.—the Department of Justice sued the entire 15-judge bench of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland. Their supposed offense? Issuing a standing order that briefly pauses deportations for 48 hours to ensure a detainee’s last-minute appeal can actually be heard by a judge. This order came after the Maryland judges had watched DHS conduct midnight deportations while cases were pending, making judicial review impossible.
The DOJ’s lawsuit crosses a line that has stood for centuries. Federal judges have historically enjoyed absolute immunity from lawsuits over their judicial acts—a protection the government has always respected, until now. Most stunning is the DOJ’s core claim: that the mere act of pausing a deportation for 48 hours to allow for judicial review inflicts irreparable harm on the government. The administration is arguing that it is being injured by the very existence of judicial oversight.
The Supreme Court is already at war with the non-hardcore-MAGA parts of the federal judiciary; this is just the next step from the administration.
> federal district courts have 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
“Old people with old ideas do not stay in power forever. Old lies and old tricks do not work forever. Time moves slowly — excruciatingly slowly, if you are always paying attention — but it does sweep away the old husks and bring new things, eventually.”
It was the hottest day of the year, and the hottest man in New York was headed uptown. Way uptown. Inwood, where the street odometer clicks past the 200s, so far uptown it makes your eyes bleed if you have to come from Brooklyn on a 1 train with broken air conditioning. Kids splashed in the fountain in Fort Tryon Park. Fruit stands slung avocados. A whiteboard in the window of a barbershop advertised “MARY JANE- 8THS- $20- SOUR DIESEL.” The sun refracted off the pavement and bounced up into your eyelids. Election day was tomorrow. Like the heat, Zohran was rising.
The smiling 33-year-old running for mayor on the “Maybe, for once, we can have nice things?” platform had a campaign stop scheduled at a nondescript residential stone apartment building on Post Avenue. He would be accompanied by City Council member Carmen de la Rosa, who grew up in this building, and whose elderly mother peeked out from a second floor window over the door, surveying the growing crowd below. The scrum of politics-adjacent people grew by the minute as the early afternoon approached. Some reporters, some photographers, a couple of TV trucks, some campaign staffers, some high key volunteers in homemade Zohran t-shirts pushing literature on confused residents who were sitting out on the block holding those little plastic electric fans in front of their faces. The kind of people who can show up at a campaign stop at 2 pm on a Monday for quasi-professional reasons.
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Jamaal Bowman, the former left wing Congressman from The Bronx who lost his reelection campaign last year, wandered up. Just for fun. He looked like a free man. White shorts, white polo shirt, white Nike high tops, shaved head, goatee. He’s not running for anything. He was just there for the energy. “It’s fucking awesome, man. Nothing else to say.” Bowman is built like a defensive lineman and talks with his hands and backslaps and daps people up constantly as he speaks. “It’s exciting, man. It’s exactly what we need, what the city needs, what the country needs, the world needs. We gotta win tomorrow so we can get right back to it and win the general. It’s fucking great.”
He talked so much like a regular person that I had a hard time believing he had spent even that small amount of time in Congress. “I was there [in DC] when Trump gave his joint address. And yeah man, I felt the energy level low amongst the party. That’s why this race is so important. We’re talking about the biggest city, in my opinion the best city, incredibly diverse city, working class city, labor driven city. So if we can do this here, it’s inspiring for the country. I already got people hitting me up like, ‘Jamaal, after you finish up with Zohran, I need you to help me in Rhode Island. I need you to help me in Jersey. I need you to help me in Kentucky.’ Local organizing and local movements can—especially with social media, right? We don’t have to rely on CNN to get shit out. It could be an inspiration.”
Bowman himself had lived the entire cycle: an inspiring local win, ascending to the national stage, then being redistricted and deposed, one more victim of the American political machine’s omnipresent determination to crush the left. Now he had found a new reason for hope. He was back in his element. He is a New York City dude. “Washington, they fugazi up there!” he said. “It’s a bunch of frauds.”
Eventually, just late enough to build the anticipation, Zohran arrived. He was wearing a black suit and a fresh white dress shirt and a burgundy tie. He had gotten a haircut and his beard was freshly trimmed. The press descended on him, a level of press comparable to what presidential candidates get on the campaign trail. Zohran stood with his back against the building wall with a halo of cameras bristling around him, responding to shouted questions. He talked about making New York City affordable. The city, he said, “is becoming a museum to what was once possible.” A nice phrase.
If you are Zohran Mamdani and you are a young DSA-aligned state legislator who was relatively unknown six months ago and who now is tied going into the last day of the Democratic mayoral primary in the biggest city in America, you owe your surging campaign to a lot of people who believe in you enough to volunteer on your behalf, and those people are going to show up at your campaign stops, and you are going to have to talk to them. The women with homemade “DOMINICANS FOR ZOHRAN” t-shirts, the older women from Harlem with loud voice decrying Andrew Cuomo to passersby, the young Brooklyn girls who canvassed for you and showed up to hand out signs, the extended universe of New Yorkers who once came across you somewhere or belonged to an organization that you belonged to and, now that you are famous, are anxious to come up and share that connection with you in person—all of these people want to speak to you. They want to whisper in your ear to describe their personal connection to you and to the grand thing that you are doing. They want to share the space with someone who may be on the verge of something surprisingly big. All of these people were there, on the hot sidewalk. They would come up and say a few words and Zohran would break out in a smile at the memory they shared, and he would hug them and pose for pictures. I have seen many politicians in many places go through this same routine and one thing that distinguishes Zohran from most of them is that, in my judgment, he looks genuinely happy doing this. He seems to actually like people. You can’t say that about everyone running for mayor.
He never got a chance to eat that shaved ice.
After all the greetings, Zohran and the City Councilwoman set off walking down Post Avenue towards the main drag of Dyckman Street, trailed by a cloud of 100 reporters and enthusiasts. On the corner of Post, we all strode past a fire hydrant that had been unscrewed and was shooting water out onto the sizzling blacktop of Academy Street. A real fucking New York City tableau.
On Dyckman, Zohran ducked into a few businesses. No use trying to follow. He went into Pizza Palace and a dozen cameramen immediately surge in behind him, blocking the door like mosquitoes in an air filter. Someone handed a campaign sign reading “FAST FREE BUSES” to a man selling shaved ice from a cart, who looked confused. But then Zohran came back and bought a red shaved ice as the crowd surrounded him and the man seemed to get caught up in the spirit of the moment, and looked excited to be in the middle of something important. The guy working in the empanada spot gave a thumbs up as we passed. The women in the nail salon pounded on the window gleefully.
We all crossed the street and Zohran went into Kenny Bakery—“BIZCOCHO DOMINICANO. DULCES FINOS. REPOSTERIA.” Then he squeezed back out and stood on the sidewalk in front of the bakery windows that were plastered with stock photos of cookies and cakes, giving a little complimentary speech about Carmen de la Rosa, who was escorting him around the neighborhood. The reporters pressed in on him and the passersby, struck by a vague sense that someone notable was here, pressed in with them. I was back against the wall and Zohran was directly in front of me. By now he had shed his black jacket. The entire back of his white shirt had turned transparent with sweat, and you could see each individual dark hair on his back pressed up against the fabric. “He doesn’t usually sweat,” a campaign staffer next to me shrugged. He would be taping the Colbert Show in three hours.
A teenage girl walking past got a glimpse of Zohran. Her hands flew up over her mouth. “Oh my god,” she gasped, in the manner of someone who has seen their teen idol. “Oh my god.” She had her cell phone camera out but was hovering shyly on the fringes. Seeing this, one of the older women who was volunteering for the campaign snatched her up and marched her directly into the heart of scrum. “ZOHRAN, there is a YOUNG PERSON here who wants to meet you!” she boomed, sweeping away all in her path. Thus the young woman got her picture, before swishing back out onto the fringes, hands still clasped in front of her mouth, vibrating.
There was a very Bobby Kennedy vibe to it all. A young politician, exciting, relatable, idealistic, kind, creating a growing center of political power by attracting people to his cause. (Zohran has better politics than Bobby Kennedy, though.) American politics is dirty and oligarchical, but there are some races, like this mayoral primary, that throw it all into exceptionally sharp relief. On one side, the likable young believer who wants affordable homes and free buses and seems to actually enjoy the presence of his fellow humans, enough to inspire forty thousand people to go fan out across the big city knocking on doors for him. On the other side, the grim, disgraced, sexually harassing ex-governor, high-handed, dismissive, remote, inaccessible, campaigning from on high, fueled by a super PAC filled with more than $20 million by a handful of billionaires, endorsed by the skeletal faces of the old establishment. Most of that super PAC’s money has been spent to produce a tsunami of negative advertisements about Zohran, all of which end up in my building’s trash chute. The city has been blanketed for weeks in a layer of glossy mailers that say “Zohran Mamdani is a SOCIALIST who wants to ELIMINATE POLICE and put HOMELESS PEOPLE right on YOUR subway train, sitting right next to you, probably. Can we risk that?” And then at the bottom in small letters it says “Paid for by the Normal Regular Folks Who Love New York City PAC—Top three funders, Mike Bloomberg, Satan, Amalgamated Poison Corporation.”
Is it possible to have one nice thing? We shall see. Somehow Zohran’s penetration into the public consciousness has peaked exactly, on the very day, of the election, with the polls drawing even at the last moment, so that anything seems possible. Everyone who believes that it is possible for politics to suck less will be smashed with a wave of either euphoria or crushing cynicism very soon.
But when people believe in things, they work. As the rally dispersed, one supporter, a pregnant woman with a white Zohran t-shirt hugging her belly, strode down Dyckman with a fistful of fliers. She wasn’t done yet. She went straight up to every person on the street she walked by—aggressively, I must say—thrusting a flier into their hands, berating them in Spanish to go vote. “No clasifique a Cuomo!” she would declare. Old men sitting on folding chairs in the shade would shrink back a bit, and accept the flier, looking a little intimidated. “Vota por Mamdani! Zohran Mamdani!” Then she would beeline to the next person on the sidewalk who was not fast enough to dodge her. There was no escape from her zeal. Because it was real. Andrew Cuomo cannot buy that.
Zohran’s staff discussed having him take the train down to his next campaign stop, but vetoed the idea— “The subway would be a whole thing.” The rest of us trudged back to the 1 train. The air conditioning was broken again. Among the sweating crowd was a woman in a blue “Hot Girls for Zohran” shirt. She was hot, it’s true. But so were we all. And so can we all be. All we have to do is believe.
Today is Election Day in New York City. If you haven’t voted yet, find your polling place here. Join DSA here. Get help organizing your workplace here. Buy my book about the labor movement here. Buy a fly How Things Work t-shirt here. Keep hope alive in 2025.
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There is a specific and lacerating shame that comes with talking about New York City politics in places where people who do not live in New York City can hear you. This is not just because the people involved are so often so embarrassing. The alpha goofiness of current Mayor Eric Adams, for instance, actually helps with this, if only because the existence of a luridly corrupt and grandiose elected official with a half-dozen Livestrong-style motivational bracelets on each wrist, who has governed more or less as Influencer Cop, is at least strange enough that it might interest someone whose experience of public life does not depend, to some extent, on that particular Influencer Cop's moods, rivalries, and federal legal entanglements.
It is accurate, if not quite sufficient, to say that the job of being New York's Mayor is understood by voters and candidates alike to be not just impossible but unclean. It is just not the sort of job that a reasonable person would take if they had designs on a future in politics beyond that office, and so as a general rule only unreasonable people have sought it. A lot of mayoral jobs are thwarted in this way, for something like the same reasons—conflict with equally self-serving state politicians and equally occluded and corrupt state politics; the impossibility of managing increasingly radicalized and unaccountable police forces; the ways in which constituent service, where powerful constituents are concerned, invariably tends to lapse into what is pretty much crime. There are some New York-specific factors in play here, with the incredible wealth and depravity of those most powerful constituents being the most salient and the fact that a reactionary tabloid newspaper that no New Yorker takes entirely seriously nevertheless winds up dictating its political reality being the most deranging. But, again, the shame is not hard to understand. Imagine explaining the New York Post to a cousin from Ohio; try to find a way to say "no but our local real estate perverts are, like, extra perverted" that doesn't sound like you're somehow bragging about it.
“The idea is less to make sure that nothing happens without that elite's approval and more to guarantee that nothing happens, period, and to hold this increasingly untenable present in place so that it does not become any other thing.”
The judge wanted us to show remorse, but I can’t apologise for fighting the climate disaster
Last week, at Minshull Street crown court in Manchester, I was sentenced to two and half years in prison for conspiring to intentionally cause a public nuisance. The prosecution’s case was that I intended to “obstruct the public or a section of the public in the exercise or enjoyment of a right that may be exercised or enjoyed by the public at large” – in other words, that I was part of Just Stop Oil’s plan to obstruct planes at Manchester airport. I did intend that – and I have a defence for my actions.
The offence of public nuisance – which falls under the Criminal Law Act 1977 and the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 – was traditionally and frequently used to prosecute significant environmental offences. It punished big corporations causing real harm to the general public by poisoning water, polluting air, emitting dust and noise or dumping chemical waste. There is no irony lost in the fact that the same offence in statutory form is now being zealously deployed to prosecute environmental protesters.
Indigo Rumbelow is co-founder of Just Stop Oil. She is serving a sentence in HMP Styal
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