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Supreme Court further endorses Trump as king [1]

['Daily Kos Staff']

Date: 2025-07-15

Another day, another Supreme Court ruling that shows the court’s conservatives are 100% down with whatever President Donald Trump wants to do. This time, they gave Trump the green light to functionally destroy the Department of Education.

Monday’s no-explanation order in McMahon v. New York allows Trump to execute his plan to fire almost 1,400 Education Department employees. When you combine these cuts with the probationary employees Trump fired earlier this year and employees who resigned, the department will be about half the size it was when Trump took office in January.

It’s basically the same big treat that the court gave to Trump last week, allowing him to fire over 1,300 State Department employees. And unlike the administration’s inability to swiftly execute tasks like bringing one man home from Salvadoran prison, it took only three days from the court’s ruling to the mass firings at the State Department. So you can expect they will purge the Education Department as quickly as they can.

Also the same as last week’s ruling? The court couldn’t be bothered to explain itself. Apparently, to the court’s conservatives, letting Trump illegally and unconstitutionally dismantle Cabinet-level agencies created by Congress is such a nothingburger that it didn’t even warrant a mention.

Secretary of Education Linda McMahon

Giving Trump this vast authority over the Department of Education sure is a different vibe than the conservative majority had about that agency when Joe Biden was president. There, the notion that Biden relied on an existing law allowing for student loan relief to expand the scope of student loan relief was the most outrageous thing a president could possibly do. In fact, Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion said Biden had engaged in an “exhaustive rewriting of the statute” by expanding student loan relief.

This time around? When no statute authorizes Trump to dismantle an agency created by Congress? Or when the only thing the administration relies upon for gutting departments is a series of Trump executive orders—which are very much not law—saying he can do it? Totally fine, totally cool, totally constitutional, go right ahead.

Actually, we have no idea what the court’s conservatives think about the underlying claim that Trump has the authority to dismantle departments because he feels like it. Monday’s ruling—as with last week’s State Department ruling and with the horrific ruling that the administration can deport immigrants to countries they are not from—does not address the merits of the case.

In other words, the court isn’t ruling that Trump can gut the Education Department. They’re just saying it’s so important that Trump gets to start gutting the Education Department immediately that he can’t wait for this case to be fully litigated. So, maybe someday, they tell themselves, when this case comes back to the court, they might determine Trump never had the authority to do these things, but hey, no harm, no foul. Surely, it’s no big deal to have been illegally fired if, a couple of years from now, the court says that shouldn’t have happened, right? Or for migrants that the administration sent to South Sudan? They can probably come back here super easily, and they definitely will not have suffered by being imprisoned or tortured in whatever random country the administration sent them to, right? Right?

The emergency appeal route is Trump’s preferred method for getting matters in front of the court, and the conservatives are happy to pretend that everything Trump wants is a genuine emergency, but they’re turning the concept of emergency relief on its head. Trump not being able to do something ASAP is an emergency, but people who are going to get deported without due process are not facing an emergency. Sure.

They’re also happy to grant Trump’s every wish. Since April 4, out of 17 emergency applications filed by the administration, they’ve ruled in favor of Trump 15 times. As bad as that statistic is, it’s actually worse. Three of the birthright-citizenship cases were combined, so Trump is batting a thousand. And only three of those 15 rulings included a majority opinion.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor

In her dissent in McMahon v. New York, Justice Sonia Sotomayor called this what it is: the court enabling the illegal behavior of the administration.

“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,” she wrote. “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.”

Sotomayor is coming in hot here, and it’s completely warranted, but she’s pulling her punches a bit by giving the majority a bit of an out here by speculating that perhaps they’re just naive and don’t understand the implications of what they’re doing. But the truth is that she knows that’s not what’s going on here, and we know that’s not what’s going on here.

There’s no credible explanation or legal justification for the court’s actions here. The only rational explanation is that they are wholly aligned with Trump’s project of turning himself into a king. They’re just as lawless as Trump, and they don’t care.

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