Trump’s Supreme Court emergency docket scorecard, by the numbers

President Trump ’s administration has filed 42 emergency pleas to the Supreme Court since retaking the White House — surpassing the count from his entire first term.

And it doesn’t look like he’s hitting the brakes any time soon. Just last week, the Justice Department asked the justices to stop a ruling favoring Democrats in a fight over TV advertising rates ahead of the midterms.

As the count ticks higher, we’re taking a look at Trump’s scorecard.

The TV ad rate case and another one concerning transgender inmates remain pending. Four others were withdrawn, leaving 36 emergency cases with an actual decision on the books.

Trump has effectively won 28 and lost eight, according to The Gavel’s analysis. That’s a nearly 80 percent success rate.

None of those wins was unanimous, however.

The Supreme Court justices often publicly highlight that the majority of decisions on their regular docket, called the “merits docket,” are unanimous. The court frequently acts unanimously in low-profile emergency disputes, too.

But when it comes to the president’s emergency requests, the justices’ ideological lines are clear.

Here’s a look at the 36 decided cases by apparent vote count:

Disclaimer: A justice can dissent in an emergency case without disclosing it (sometimes called a “stealth dissent”). This is based on dissents revealed publicly.

The four unanimous decisions? One was moot, another was cleared out after the justices decided an overlapping case, and the other two were unanimous losses for the administration.

He can blame Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson for that. She’s the only one of the court’s liberals to have publicly dissented against him every time he’s won.

Jackson has made no secret of her detestation for the Trump administration’s emergency docket tactics. It’s the subject of a lecture she regularly gives while traveling the country, and in opinions, she has called her colleagues’ decisions “ Calvinball jurisprudence ,” “ hubristic and senseless ” and a “ Kafkaesque nightmare .”

The two other liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, are sometimes aligned with Jackson, but the duo didn’t sign onto that searing prose.

In a few cases, they haven’t noted a dissent at all.

Sotomayor didn’t in two of Trump’s wins: at early stages of lawsuits over cutbacks to temporary protected status and large-scale government layoffs.

Kagan didn’t in four: those two Sotomayor cases, plus a battle over probationary employee firings and a challenge to Trump ending a Biden-era parole program .

To be clear, Trump hasn’t always won. And some of his eight losses were sizable:

The justices declined the administration’s pleas to freeze nearly $2 billion in foreign aid payments; reverse a whistleblower office head’s reinstatement; block the return of Kilmar Ábrego Garcia after his mistaken deportation to El Salvador; greenlight the firing of the Federal Reserve’s Lisa Cook; block a lawsuit over immigration judges’ public speech restrictions; deploy the National Guard in Chicago; re-fire the nation’s top copyright official ; and, most recently, OK his mail-in voting plan for the midterms.

The Supreme Court’s emergency docket is not new — for example, the court has long considered last-ditch efforts to stave off executions — but it has surged in activity during Trump’s presidencies.

The president’s critics say his flood of appeals reflects that he is acting lawlessly. Trump and his supporters say lower judges stymying the president’s agenda are the ones at fault and are forcing the administration’s hand.

Regardless of who is right, emergency cases now dominate the court’s work.

So, let’s look at the scorecard for those lower judges. Trump’s emergency docket wins have stopped more than a dozen.

Four judges have seen it happen more than once. Most of them serve on the bench in Boston: Brian Murphy and Myong Joun , both appointees of former President Biden , and Indira Talwani , an appointee of former President Obama . Edward Chen , an Obama appointee who serves in San Francisco, rounds out the leaderboard.

Just four of Trump’s 28 wins pushed back on a district judge appointed by a Republican president.

That’s no surprise. After all, litigants are concentrating their lawsuits in favorable districts, which are frequently assigned to judges appointed by Democratic presidents, who have repeatedly ruled against the president.

Welcome to The Gavel, The Hill’s weekly newsletter unpacking the intersection of courts & politics from Zach Schonfeld and S ophie Brams . Email us tips at zschonfeld@thehill.com and sbrams@thehill.com . You can also reach out to us on X (@ZachASchonfeld and @sophiebrams) or Signal (zachschonfeld.48 and sbrams.32).

Trump ads blocked: The Trump administration was ordered by a federal judge in New York to immediately stop airing political ads featuring the president. A watchdog group, union and others have challenged the campaign as an unlawful use of government funds.

White House media ban : The Trump administration cannot bar CNN, Politico and MS NOW from accessing the White House while their lawsuit challenging the media ban continues, a federal judge has ruled

DOJ in hot seat: A federal judge in Washington, D.C., told Justice Department lawyers Monday that she was “furious” and “beyond disappointed” after hundreds of trees were abruptly cut down at East Potomac Park with less than a day’s notice. The judge has ordered a pause in tree removal through at least Oct. 26 while she weighs a longer injunction.

Trump’s triumphal arch challenged: The county of Arlington, Va., is suing the Trump administration to block construction of a proposed 250-foot arch in the nation’s capital.

Tupac murder mastermind sentenced: Duane “Keffe D” Davis has been sentenced to 40 years in prison after he was found guilty of orchestrating the drive-by shooting that killed rapper Tupac Shakur in 1996

The Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation, which handles all civil immigration cases, has seen its caseload jump to record highs under the second Trump administration despite a dwindling number of attorneys. Our colleague Rebecca Beitsch took a look at the data.

Scrutiny surrounding the high-profile sexual assault investigation at Cornell University has intensified with the appointment of New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) as a special prosecutor. Our colleague Lexi Lonas Cochran has more .

White House press pool fight turns to antitrust

President Trump ’s longstanding feud with the media is escalating again.

The Justice Department announced over the weekend that it is opening an antitrust investigation into the country’s five major television networks after they briefly suspended pool coverage in solidarity with outlets that were barred from the White House.

The networks — NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN and Fox News — stopped providing shared video coverage of the president’s daily activities for several days last month in response to Trump’s decision to revoke the badges of CNN, Politico and MS NOW journalists.

Pool coverage resumed after a federal judge ordered access be immediately restored, but the White House has since barred CNN and Politico from fulfilling their duties, including aboard Air Force One.

A spokesperson for the Justice Department said it is examining whether the pause violated federal antitrust law, calling it a “group boycott among commercial competitors.”

The underlying legal principle is found in Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, a law passed during the peak of the industrial revolution that was intended to curb anti-competitive practices and rein in monopolies.

It reads, in part: “Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal.”

Federal agencies like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) assert that group boycotts can become illegal when they are used to fix prices, restrict or disadvantage competition or jointly target a certain entity.

“Any company may, on its own, refuse to do business with another firm, but an agreement among competitors not to do business with targeted individuals or businesses may be an illegal boycott, especially if the group of competitors working together has market power,” FTC guidance states.

The distinction has been heavily parsed in the courts.

In a landmark 1911 Supreme Court case called Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States, the court interpreted the Sherman Act to prohibit only unreasonable or undue restraints of trade rather than all restraints.

To determine whether the agreement crosses that threshold, the justices adopted a standard known as the “rule of reason.” It weighs the anticompetitive harms of a practice against its commercial benefits by analyzing factors like purpose and market power.

But courts have also treated some agreements as “per se” violations, which are so blatantly anti-competitive that they can be found automatically illegal without the balancing test.

It remains an open question how either approach could be applied to the pool coverage scenario, as courts have historically distinguished between economic boycotts and purely political ones.

The high court found in a 1990 case that a group of private lawyers in D.C. committed antitrust violations when they agreed to stop providing legal services to indigent defendants until the city raised their fees. Years earlier, the court concluded that a socio-politically-motivated, NAACP-led boycott of white-owned businesses in Mississippi was protected by the First Amendment.

The television networks have not publicly addressed the investigation but previously said in a joint statement that “no administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.”

Cases the Supreme Court is taking up — or passing on — this term.

IN: DOGE, ‘material support’ for terrorists

The Supreme Court took up three new cases Tuesday. We previewed all of them in previous editions as ones to watch:

In U.S. Doge Service v. U.S. District Court for D.C. , the justices will consider the Trump administration’s efforts to stave off a judge’s demand that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) turn over documents to shed light on whether it must respond to public records requests.

The high court on its emergency docket already sided with the administration at an earlier stage of the case. Now, they’re taking it up on their normal docket.

In Blanche v. Ozurumba, the court will review whether a Nigerian man’s cooking for a terrorist group while in captivity amounted to “material support” for the group, making him ineligible for asylum.

And in Berry v. United States, the court will wade into when criminal defendants bringing habeas petitions are entitled to appeal rejected arguments.

It’s a thorny issue, but it’s one that matters to Dave Clark , a former real estate executive commuted by Trump. He had a similar petition pending with the justices, which they’re holding onto.

OUT: Sotomayor, Gorsuch join forces on immigration

Last week, we told you to keep an eye on Herrera-Salazar v. United States .

A Mexican man was arguing it violated his double jeopardy rights to prosecute him a second time for illegally reentering the country while he was still on supervised release for the first conviction. That barred him from leaving U.S. soil.

The court turned away the man’s case, but it only came over a harsh rebuke of the government’s conduct from both a liberal and conservative justice.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor — an appointee of former President Obama — joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch — an appointee of President Trump — called it “ constitutional absurdity .”

“Because I hope the facts of this case are anomalous and because Herrera-Salazar has since been removed from the United States, I concur in the Court’s decision not to grant review in this case,” Sotomayor wrote.

Petitions for the Supreme Court to take up cases we are keeping a close eye on …

Roberto Clemente trademark: Puerto Rico made $15 million off license plates branded with imagery of baseball legend Roberto Clemente. His sons say it misappropriated his legacy and want the Supreme Court to reverse a partial loss dismissing some of their claims against Puerto Rico officials. The case is Clemente Properties, Inc v. Pierluisi-Urrutia .

Race-neutral admissions: The court has its latest opportunity to take up whether their decision invalidating affirmative action in college admissions also blocks schools from using race-neutral criteria to encourage diversity. The court previously turned away a similar case concerning a top-ranked high school in Virginia just outside the nation’s capital. Now, the issue has arisen on the other side of the city on the Maryland side of the border. The case is Association for Education Fairness, Petitioner v. Montgomery County Board of Education.

Sex offenders on Halloween: Missouri law requires convicted sex offenders to remain inside on Halloween, avoid contact with children, turn off outdoor lights and post a sign saying, “No candy or treats at this residence.” A man convicted of sodomizing a teenage girl — and later of violating the Halloween law — says it compels his speech in violation of the First Amendment. Missouri’s attorney general wants to revive the law.

Home distilling ban: Federal law makes it a felony to distill spirits in a home . The Trump administration appeals a ruling found it unconstitutional, rejecting the notion that the provision is necessary and proper for Congress to carry out its power to tax the beverages. A defendant charged in a different court, which ruled the other way, appeals in his case. The cases are Department of Justice v. McNutt and Ream v. Department of the Treasury.

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Salazar v. Paramount Global , a case concerning whether the Video Privacy Protection Act protects consumers who subscribe to any of a company’s products or only those who subscribe to its audiovisual ones.

A federal judge in D.C. will hold a hearing in a lawsuit brought by the National Democratic Committee which seeks to block the Trump administration from using taxpayer money to fund political ads.

An evidentiary hearing is scheduled in the murder retrial of Alex Murdaugh , who is accused in the 2021 killings of his wife and son in South Carolina.

The Supreme Court will release an orders list with actions in pending appeals.

A federal judge in D.C. will hear testimony from Trump administration officials in a dispute over the removal of hundreds of trees in East Potomac Park.

A federal judge in California will hear arguments in a lawsuit from two nurses unions seeking to block armed immigration officers from conducting enforcement at polling places during the midterms.

A federal judge in Massachusetts will hold a hearing to decide whether to resolve the state’s challenge to Medicaid work requirements provision passed in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act without a full trial.

A federal judge in Washington will hear arguments as the Trump administration seeks to dismiss a lawsuit from 15 Democratic-led states over a Day 1 executive order declaring a national energy emergency .

The Washington Post’s Julian Mark and Justin Jouneval : How the Supreme Court is reshaping the limits of religious rights in America

The New York Times’s Julie Bosman and Andrea Barnes : At Cornell, a Sorority Finds Itself Sued by One of Its Own