In the United States, Donald Trump’s regime has found its willing wingman in Chief Justice John Roberts and the other Republicans on the Supreme Court. The Roberts court is game to do everything Trump wants it to do and, as an added bonus, to do most of it in secret, under cover of what’s known as the shadow docket.

The “shadow docket” is the colloquial term for the court’s emergency docket—those cases for which the court, at the request of a litigant, issues expedited rulings and does so without a full briefing from the lawyers involved or a full hearing on the issue at hand. The emergency docket is supposed to be used for, well, emergencies: cases that require an immediate response to avert irrevocable harm. The classic emergency-docket case is a death-penalty appeal. A person set to be executed in the morning cannot wait for the court to consider their appeal in a year and a half.

Technically, shadow-docket rulings are supposed to be temporary, pending a full hearing by the court on the merits of the case. In reality, many are final, because the harm the Trump administration does in the interim cannot be easily undone. If the court temporarily approves Trump’s right to fire you or cut off your food or bomb your boat, it’s hard to undo those actions a year later, when the court considers the merits of your unemployed, starving, charred case.

Many court watchers have sounded the alarm over the Supreme Court’s use of the shadow docket in recent years—notably, since 2017, when Trump arrived at the White House. Until then, it was exceedingly rare for a president to make an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court. During their respective terms (for a total of 16 years), George W. Bush and Barack Obama each made only eight emergency appeals. Trump, by contrast, made 41 in his first term. Joe Biden made 19 over his four years in office, a number that the second Trump administration matched in just its first 20 weeks. Trump uses and abuses this process so much that some people now call it the “Trump docket.” Anytime he gets a lower-court ruling he doesn’t like, he runs to the Supreme Court asking for emergency relief. And he usually gets it: As of this writing, Trump has received decisions in 23 cases on the shadow docket. He’s won 20 of them.