Analysis Finds 97 Percent of Trump DOJ Emergency SCOTUS Filings Claim Judges Are Interfering With Presidential Power

An Associated Press analysis circulated in August 2026 and cited by the Brennan Center found that of the 31 emergency applications the Trump Justice Department filed at the Supreme Court between February 2025 and the date of the count, 97 percent argued that the lower-court judge below was improperly interfering with presidential authority. The comparison figure in the same analysis is 26 percent, drawn from the 19 emergency applications the Biden administration filed across four years. The denominators are small — 31 and 19 — and the measure is what the government’s own briefs assert, not an adjudicated finding about any judge. Two other figures travel with this story and belong to different compilers: legal analysts and SCOTUSblog commentary put the Court’s rate of siding with the administration on these emergency rulings at roughly 80 percent, frequently in orders that state no reasoning; a separate and more loosely sourced claim puts Trump-appointed appellate judges at 97 percent agreement with the administration on emergency stays, a statistic whose author and dataset this record has not been able to identify and which should be treated as unverified.

The 97-percent framing figure is the one that carries analytical weight, because it describes a litigating position rather than an outcome. A government that files nearly every emergency application on the theory that the district judge exceeded her authority is asking the Supreme Court to rule on the judiciary’s structure, not just on the policy under review — and it is asking through a procedural channel that produces orders without opinions, which generate no precedent a future litigant can cite but bind the parties immediately. Justices Jackson and Kavanaugh publicly disagreed about exactly this in 2026, sharing a stage to argue over what the emergency orders favoring the administration mean.

The corpus has tracked the mechanism through individual orders and through its own aggregate milestone: ProPublica documented that the October 2025 term was the first in which the Court decided more cases by shadow docket than by argued opinion (2026-07-02–propublica-shadow-docket-milestone-secretive-votes), after the emergency docket had already been identified as an instrument of expanded executive power (2025-10-03–supreme-court-emergency-docket-expands-trump-power). The substantive results are in the record: the stay in Noem v. Doe terminating CHNV parole (2025-05-30–scotus-stays-noem-v-doe-chnv-parole-termination), Mullin v. Doe barring judicial review of Haiti and Syria TPS terminations (2026-06-25–scotus-mullin-v-doe-ends-haiti-syria-tps-judicial-review-barred), the reinstatement of Alabama’s Republican map over a district-court finding of intentional discrimination (2026-06-02–scotus-shadow-docket-reinstates-alabama-gop-map-over-intentional-discrimination-finding), and the August 24 stay lifting the block on the mail-ballot executive order (2026-08-24–scotus-shadow-docket-stay-lifts-block-trump-mail-ballot-eo) that the administration had raced to the Court in July (2026-07-28–trump-races-scotus-shadow-docket-mail-ballot-restrictions). It runs alongside the appointment channel — 53 Article III confirmations in 18 months, every circuit vacancy filled (2026-08-07–trump-judicial-pipeline-slows-53-judges-49-vacancies-remain) — and the direct-pressure channel the administration opened when it asked the Court to limit federal judges’ power outright (2026-03-07–trump-pushes-supreme-court-to-limit-federal-judge-power).