Trump’s Supreme Court, the Shadow Docket, and the New Normal (with Aaron Parnas)
The Oath and The Office
Corey Brettschneider
4.9 • 591 Ratings
🗓️ 23 April 2026
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode of The Oath and The Office, we begin with the Supreme Court: the shadow docket, Clarence Thomas, and a judiciary that increasingly operates with extraordinary power and too little accountability.
We then turn to the case against the former CIA director, along with the resignation of a Justice Department prosecutor, and ask what these developments reveal about the state of law, accountability, and political pressure inside the justice system.
Then Aaron Parnas joins us. Parnas has built a massive audience by reporting breaking political news to a younger generation in real time, often outside traditional media. We ask him a bigger question: can the news be reported outside the wider context of the threat to democracy? And when Parnas argues that much of this feels normal to people who grew up in the Trump era, Corey asks what it means when democratic crisis starts to feel ordinary.
We also discuss Trump’s reported pressure on the IRS, the questions surrounding Kash Patel and the FBI, and why these stories may be part of a much broader pattern.
This is a conversation about power, accountability, and the risk of treating democratic erosion as the new normal.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Oath in the Office podcast. |
| 0:11.6 | I'm John Fuglesing. |
| 0:12.8 | It's so great to have you with us and let us welcome the star of our show, the author of The Oath and the Office. |
| 0:18.6 | That would be Brown University political science professor. |
| 0:21.3 | Corey Brechtider. Professor, it's good to see you. Welcome back. |
| 0:24.5 | Thanks, John. You know, I look forward to this discussion every week, even as the chaos and the |
| 0:28.9 | threats to democracy increase. And we're going to talk, of course, about the shadow docket |
| 0:33.3 | and some amazing inside information that we finally have about this secret process. |
| 0:38.5 | We'll explain this secret process and why it is a threat to democracy. |
| 0:42.0 | And we'll also talk about our favorite Supreme Court justice. |
| 0:44.8 | Well, not exactly, but somebody we certainly find interesting. |
| 0:47.7 | That's Clarence Thomas and his speech that he gave. |
| 0:50.2 | So it's going to be an amazing show. |
| 0:51.7 | And of course, we have Aaron Parnas, one of the best commentators, young commentators on politics today, really focused on breaking news. And one of the reasons I've been so eager to talk to him is whenever I talk to young people, by which I mean really people under 35, his name always comes up as somebody who's really doing a lot to keep people informed, even in the midst of this messed up media ecosystem. So quite a show today. |
| 1:15.6 | Well, I want to talk to you about this shadow docket business because I've learned a lot about this from you. And now the New York Times had this uncovered internal memos that reveal this shadow docket wasn't really an organic evolution. This thing was rushed. |
| 1:28.3 | It was a strategic break from centuries of judicial restraint. |
| 1:32.3 | You know, John Roberts always says he wants the judges to be umpires, |
| 1:36.3 | but it turns out, I think, Corey, he wants him to be the kind of umpires |
| 1:39.3 | who called the game in the first inning and then go home. |
| 1:41.3 | In just five days in 2016, this five-four conservative majority |
| 1:46.2 | halted Barack Obama's clean power plan before any lower court could rule on it. They just put out a |
| 1:50.9 | one paragraph order with no explanation. And these memos show there was a real rush to predict the |
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