[[link removed]] Ms. Memo: This Week in Women's Rights
August 27, 2025
From the ongoing fight for abortion rights and access, to elections, to the drive for the Equal Rights Amendment, there are a multitude of battles to keep up with. In this weekly roundup, find the absolute need-to-know news for feminists.
Democracies Die in the Shadows: How the Conservative Supreme Court Is Abusing Its Emergency Docket to Give Trump a Law-Free Zone [[link removed]]
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(Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
By Stephen Rohde | James Madison, the Constitution’s principal draftsman, wrote no less than five of the Federalist Papers to explain why separating the three branches of government was fundamental to preserving liberty. “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
Today, not only are all three branches of the federal government under the control of the Republican party, they are all acting in obedient servitude to a single individual: President Donald J. Trump.
To compound the problem, the U.S. Supreme Court is employing a rarely used procedure to create a law-free zone to help Trump aggressively implement his executive orders, despite the fact that they have already been found unconstitutional by numerous federal judges.
The American people expect that when the Supreme Court decides important constitutional issues affecting their lives and our very democracy, the Court will have seriously and thoroughly considered those issues.
And lower court judges, lawyers, elected officials and others who are familiar with Court procedure expect that the Court will have considered the legal briefs of the parties and additional friend-of-the-court briefs, conducted oral arguments, met in conference to evaluate the arguments of both sides, and exchanged drafts of potential opinions before issuing well-reasoned majority (and sometimes dissenting) opinions explaining the justices’ analyses, with citations to the facts of the case and legal precedent.
There are rare occasions—such as the impending execution of a death row inmate who has yet to exhaust their legal appeals—when the rules of the Supreme Court allow for immediate temporary stays, to maintain the status quo while the Court decides the case on the merits.
But now the six-member conservative super-majority on the current Court—all appointed by Republican presidents, and three by Trump—are abusing the emergency docket, popularly known as the shadow docket, not to maintain the status quo, but to disrupt it.
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Read more:
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Abortion Pill Crackdown, Anti-Trans Bathroom Bill and Discriminatory Maps: Texas GOP Escalates Retaliation After Democratic Walkout [[link removed]] Of Course Trump Threatened Ballot Access on the 19th Amendment’s Anniversary [[link removed]]
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Over a Million Women Are at Risk of a Pay Cut Under a New Trump Rule [[link removed]] Real Change for Women in Politics Requires Fixing Broken Systems [[link removed]]
What we're reading:
Because it's hard to keep up with everything going on in the world right now. Here's what we're reading this week:
* "Trump’s Promise to End Vote-by-Mail Is Yet Another Attack on Disabled Voters” — Mother Jones [[link removed]]
[link removed] [[link removed]] Listen to the latest podcast from Ms. Studios! The latest episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward is out now on Apple Podcasts [[link removed]] + Spotify [[link removed]] .
This episode traces 50-plus years of feminist writing and advocacy focused on naming, confronting, and preventing sexual harassment, rape culture and intimate partner violence—and the urgency of acknowledging the violence of patriarchy, white supremacy and other social forces in our everyday lives and building a future without fear.
We hope you'll listen, subscribe, rate and review today!
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