'Willfully blind': Experts slam Supreme Court for letting Trump abolish Dept. of Education

14 July

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in 2017 (Creative Commons)

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled on party lines to allow President Donald Trump to move forward with his decision to abolish the U.S. Department of Education, and both the Court's liberal minority and various legal experts are condemning the decision.

Slate legal journalist Mark Joseph Stern posted Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissent in the decision to Bluesky, and noted that none of the Court's six conservative appointees offered any explanation for their ruling, which overturned a previous decision to block the Education Department's elimination via executive order by a lower court judge earlier this year. In addition to Sotomayor, Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — appointed by former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, respectively — also dissented.

"Lifting the District Court’s injunction will unleash untold harm, delaying or denying educational opportunities and leaving students to suffer from discrimination, sexual assault, and other civil rights violations without the federal resources Congress intended," Sotomayor wrote. "The majority apparently deems it more important to free the Government from paying employees it had no right to fire than to avert these very real harms while the litigation continues."

"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 continued. "... 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."

Other legal observers also blasted the decision, including University of Michigan Law School professor Leah Litman. She noted on her Bluesky account that the Court's conservative majority struck down Biden's student debt cancellation due to statutes prohibiting it, yet is allowing Trump to unilaterally dismantle a Congressionally authorized federal agency despite such an act requiring a vote from both chambers of Congress. Software quality assurance engineer Mike Rhone called the Court's ruling "insanity" in that it allows a president to "unilaterally destroy something Congress creates." Nuclear weapons expert Stephen Schwartz also pondered whether the Supreme Court would similarly enable a potential executive order from Trump shrinking the judiciary.

"The Opus Dei Court continues to understand that its sole function is simply to rubber stamp whatever Trump wishes to do," Harper's Magazine contributing editor Scott Horton wrote. "This ruling is another doozie."

"If the Supreme Court is going to let Trump pretend Article 1 doesn't exist, Trump's a king," Georgia State University political scientist Jeff Lazarus wrote. "I don't know any other way to interpret this ruling."

Click here to read Sotomayor's full dissent.

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