Sotomayor blasts court’s ruling allowing Trump to fire agency heads

Justice Sonia Sotomayor delivered a fiery dissent Monday against the Supreme Court’s decision backing President Donald Trump’s power to fire members of independent federal agencies, describing the Republican-appointed majority’s ruling as one that cuts away at the Constitution.

Sotomayor spent nearly 20 minutes reading her dissent from the bench — an uncommon practice, though not the first time she has done so recently — in Trump v. Slaughter.

In a defiant tone, and with palpable anger, she described the decision as “grievously wrong” and one that “reshapes the structure of government in a fundamental way” by giving the president “a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once-coequal branches.”

As a result of the decision, Sotomayor wrote, “dozens of independent commissions are now likely to become purely executive agencies, shifting tremendous power over broad swaths of American life into the President’s hands.”

The decision allowing Trump to fire Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, without cause upends a 1935 precedent that had protected the independence of agencies.

In doing so, Sotomayor said, the court is transforming the president’s “duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.”

Sotomayor said the court is furthering an “absolutist” view of presidential power and that there should be a “counterbalance” to it. She called the ruling a “profoundly destabilizing result” that ignores the separation of powers written into the Constitution.

“These great statesmen and Justices knew something that today’s majority apparently does not: that fealty to the Constitution means respecting not just what it says, but what it does not say and by its silence leaves to others to decide,” Sotomayor wrote.

Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined in Sotomayor’s dissent.

Sotomayor, an Obama appointee, read from her dissent in a different case last week when her Republican colleagues allowed the Trump administration to turn away asylum seekers who have not set foot on U.S. soil.

Fallon Gallagher and Jordan Rubin contributed reporting.

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