Justice Sonia Sotomayor Just Skewered Her Supreme Court Peers For Their Gutlessness

Late Monday afternoon, deep in the shadows of the shadow docket, the Supreme Court may have achieved the perfect, Aristotelian combination of lawlessness and gutlessness. As we all know from civics class, the president cannot unilaterally eliminate a Cabinet department created by statute by the Congress. (There is a little thing called Article 1 of the Constitution standing in the way.) But the carefully manufactured conservative majority on the current Supreme Court doesn't let minor hurdles like that keep it from its duties as a six-headed lapdog. Essentially, it has told the president that he can abolish a Cabinet department simply by firing nearly everybody working there. It is an altogether remarkable document in that the majority doesn't even pretend there's a legal basis for its decision. It simply places a stay on a decision by a federal district court here in the Commonwealth (God save it!) that denied the president's right to clear-cut a Cabinet agency. What we are left with is a clear-eyed and impassioned dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor that shows that she plainly knows what the administration is doing is a sleight-of-hand trick by which the Department of Education simply will disappear. From that dissent:

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. Two lower courts rose to the occasion, preliminarily enjoining the mass firings while the litigation remains ongoing. Rather than maintain the status quo, however, this Court now intervenes, lifting the injunction and permitting the Government to proceed with dismantling the Department. That decision is indefensible. It hands the Executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out. The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive, but either way the threat to our Constitution’s separation of powers is grave...

...The Department did not explain how terminating half of the agency’s work force overnight would improve efficiency, nor how it would be able to continue carrying out its statutory functions.

The reason for that silence soon became apparent. In statements to the press, McMahon confirmed the reduction in force was “the first step on the road to a total shutdown” of the Department, as directed by the President. Similarly, when asked during a congressional hearing whether the Department had conducted “an actual analysis to determine what the effects of [the reduction in force] would be” on the Department’s ability to carry out its statutory functions, McMahon responded, “No.”...

...The President must take care that the laws are faithfully executed, not set out to dismantle them. That basic rule undergirds our Constitution’s separation of powers. Yet today, the majority rewards clear defiance of that core principle with emergency relief.

That's a lot of words to say, "You clowns have to be kidding with this shit."