The Supreme Court's Latest Gift to Trump Is a Dark Turning Point

(Slate) On Monday, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to move forward with its abolition of the Education Department by firing about 1,400 employees. Many of these workers performed critical tasks at the agency, distributing billions of dollars to schools and students while protecting civil rights and disability access in education. Much of that work will now grind to a halt. By law, the president has no authority to unilaterally restructure or dismantle a federal agency, like the Education Department, created and funded by Congress. The Supreme Court’s conservatives allowed Trump to do it anyway. They did not bother to provide a reason for their order. All three liberals dissented.

Monday’s decision in McMahon v. New York represents the Supreme Court’s latest intervention on the administration’s behalf over its shadow docket, an act that’s grown almost routine. The conservative supermajority has consistently exploited this process to hand Trump an unprecedented amount of power, usually without a word of explanation. But McMahon is arguably more radical than those past rulings. SCOTUS has now, in effect, allowed the president to destroy an entire agency by himself, an action that would’ve been unthinkable for most of history. The conservative justices are accelerating this administration’s lawless seizure of duties and prerogatives that the Constitution expressly assigned to Congress. They are doing so after sharply limiting President Joe Biden’s power to carry out responsibilities that are assigned to the president.

This split-screen reveals an unseemly double standard: A Republican president gets to do pretty much whatever he wants, while a Democratic president must be constantly boxed in by the courts. And what is the basis for this discrepancy? Thanks to the shadow docket, the conservative justices don’t even have to come up with one. Perhaps they refuse to justify these decisions in writing for the simple reason that they are unjustifiable.

McMahon is the latest proof that Trump is on an extraordinary winning spree at the Supreme Court. As Georgetown Law Prof. Steve Vladeck explained on Monday, the court has granted relief to the Trump administration in 100 percent of the 15 emergency applications it has filed since April. (It offered majority opinions in just three of those cases.) Just last week, SCOTUS allowed the government to begin implementing a mass-firing plan across many different agencies. Now it has rubber-stamped a more targeted attack on the Education Department, one with devastating consequences for millions of student across the country. ...............(more)

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/07/supreme-court-trump-department-of-education-disaster.html