Trump Fumes as Team Scrambles Over Deputy FBI Director
The Supreme Court has cleared the way for Trump to destroy the Department of Education.
Until Monday, a lower court’s injunction had barred the administration from firing about half of the department’s roughly 4,000 employees—halting a move that Education Secretary Linda McMahon called “the first step in a total shutdown” of the department—while the layoffs were challenged in court.
On Monday, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority granted the administration’s emergency request to lift the injunction, greenlighting Trump’s effort to demolish the agency.
While the majority provided no explanation for its order, Justice Sonia Sotomayor penned a dissent and was joined by fellow liberal justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Sotomayor called the majority’s decision “indefensible,” and railed against her conservative colleagues for being either “naive” or “willfully blind to the implications of [their] ruling.”
“When the Executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the Judiciary’s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it,” Sotomayor wrote. While lower courts “rose to the occasion” in pausing the firings, she said, the Supreme Court has made itself complicit in Trump’s lawlessness.
Trump’s moves regarding the Department of Education, she continued, boil down to an attempt to assert “the power to repeal federal law by way of mass terminations,” thereby encroaching on congressional powers and flouting the president’s constitutional responsibility to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
Any “pocketbook harm” the government claims it incurred by paying the fired DOE employees, Sotomayor wrote, pales in comparison to “the harm to this Nation’s education system and individual students” incurred by dismantling the agency.
