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The Supreme Court granted the Trump administration’s bid to lift a judge’s order that required reinstating about 1,400 fired Education Department employees, allowing the government to move forward with its efforts to dismantle the agency.
The unsigned order, issued Monday via the so-called emergency docket, did not offer any rationale from the majority for allowing the firings to be carried out while litigation continues.
In a scathing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “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.” Calling the majority’s decision “indefensible,” the Obama appointee said 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 two other Democratic-appointed justices, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined Sotomayor’s dissent.
The Trump administration had argued that U.S. District Judge Myong Joun overstepped when he granted a preliminary injunction in May. Solicitor General John Sauer noted that the high court had recently lifted another order that Joun issued against the administration, on education-related grants.
“For the second time in three months, the same district court has thwarted the Executive Branch’s authority to manage the Department of Education despite lacking jurisdiction to second-guess the Executive’s internal management decisions,” Sauer wrote in his June 6 high court application.
“This Court curtailed that overreach when the district court attempted to prevent the Department from terminating discretionary grants,” Sauer continued, referring to the Supreme Court’s prior intervention, adding: “In this case, the district court is attempting to prevent the Department from restructuring its workforce, despite lacking jurisdiction several times over. Intervention is again warranted.”
Opposing the administration’s application, a coalition of states led by New York defended the district judge, saying he “correctly concluded, based on a detailed factual record unrebutted by petitioners, that the States are likely to show the RIF [reduction in force] is arbitrary and capricious, contrary to law, and unconstitutional.”
Monday’s decision is the second in as many weeks in which the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration on mass layoffs of federal employees.
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