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

Justice Sonia Sotomayor delivered a fiery dissent Monday in 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.

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Inside the chambers, Sotomayor spent nearly 20 minutes reading from the bench her dissenting opinion in Trump v. Slaughter — an uncommon practice for a dissenting justice.

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.”

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.”

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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.

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.

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Fallon Gallagher and Jordan Rubin contributed reporting.