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SCOTUS EMPOWERS KING POTUS YET AGAIN [1]
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Date: 2025-07-17
Opinion writer, Kimberly Wehle, for the Hill web magazine reports that SCOTUS has enabled the self-described Dictator Trump the power to arbitrarily gut the 1979 Congressional law called the Department of Education Organization Act in its shadow docket ruling in McMahon v. New York of July 14th. The case involved the Dictator’s March 20 Executive Order to close the Department of Education and his Education Secretary’s subsequent action to fire half of the Department’s workforce to facilitate that end:
Twenty states and the District of Columbia sued, arguing that his actions violated the Take Care Clause and the Constitution’s separation of powers, incapacitating core components of the Department of Education on which the states rely. A similar lawsuit by school districts and unions followed. The cases were combined, and a district court issued an injunction preserving the status quo, keeping the department and the nation’s school system intact while the case was pending. An appeals court upheld that injunction. To wit, thehill.com/...
Although Article 2, Section 3 (Take Care Clause) of the US Constitution limits Presidential power by bestowing the power to make laws to Congress and obligates the Executive to faithfully execute the same, the right-wing majority on the court simply tossed the injunctions out without explanation. Only Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson wrote powerful dissents decrying the ruling as an egregious assault on our Checks and Balances system, the fulcrum upon which democracy rests:
The Government’s arguments stumble from the start. In our constitutional order, Congress “makes laws” and the President “ ‘faithfully execute[s]’ them.” Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA, 573 U. S. 302, 327 (2014) (quoting U. S. Const., Art. II, §3; alteration in original). “The Founders of this Nation entrusted the lawmaking power to the Congress alone,” Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U. S. 579, 589 (1952), and “[t]here is no provision in the Constitution that authorizes the President to enact, to amend, or to repeal statutes.” Clinton v. City of New York, 524 U. S. 417, 438 (1998) The President thus lacks unilateral authority to close a Cabinet-level agency. Congress created the Department, and only Congress can abolish it. The President, too, may not refuse to carry out statutorily mandated functions assigned to the Department, for he must “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Art. II, §3... 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. Because I cannot condone such abuse of our equitable authority, I respectfully dissent. Read the dissent here, www.law.cornell.edu/...
As a practical matter, the Department of Education is also charged with partially funding K-12 public education and providing federal grants to higher education. Moreover, it is mandated to ensure that the civil rights of all students are respected by public schools nationwide. With the new school term approaching, federal financial aid certifications are in limbo without staff to perform the duties. This was the intent of the Dictator and his friends at Project 2025 all along— to impede access to education for the majority of lower and middle classes and to those students with special needs under the guise of “reducing bureaucratic bloat.”
The SCOTUS “6” has institutionalized rule by “executive fiat” and has put another nail into the coffin of democracy. How far we have strayed from 7 September 1792 when President George Washington wrote to Alexander Hamilton, “It is my duty to see the Laws executed: to permit them to be trampled upon with impunity would be repugnant to it; nor can the Government longer remain a passive spectator of the contempt with which they are treated.” To wit, founders.archives.gov/...Today, King POTUS does the opposite and delights in dismantling the paramount law, article by article.
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