In Trump v. American Federation of Government Employees, the Supreme Court stayed a lower court injunction preventing the administration from formulating any administrative agency reduction in force or reorganization plan. No plan itself was before the Court. Justice Sotomayor concurred, noting that the applicable executive order directs agencies to plan reorganizations and reductions in force “consistent with applicable law.”
The Supreme Court therefore authorized Trump to exercise his lawful authority. It sounds redundant to say so. It follows a fortiori from the premise that each of the three branches is accorded lawful authority under the Constitution.
However, this was too much for Justice Jackson. She dissents from the Court’s disposition of the application for stay. I actually thinks she goes wrong in her opening sentence — “Under our Constitution, Congress has the power to establish administrative agencies and detail their functions,” although Supreme Court precedent says otherwise — and descends from there. She disparages the Court’s disposition of the application for stay as “hubristic and senseless.”
“Hubristic” — I can hear the voice of Robert DeNiro’s character in Taxi Driver. “You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? Then who the hell else you talkin’ to?”
Well, yes. She’s talkin’ to you, Chief Justice Roberts. She’s talkin’ to you, Justice Kagan. She’s even talkin’ to you, Justice Sotomayor. And all the rest of her colleagues.
Which reminds me. I don’t think I have written about Justice Sotomayor since my 2009 post “I, Latina,” but I would like to think it has stood the test of time.
