’CHAOS WILL FOLLOW’

Liberal Justice Makes Dire Prediction About Trump Ruling

Justice Sonia Sotomayor said her colleagues left the president “with far greater power than ever before.”

The three liberal-leaning justices on the Supreme Court are sounding the alarm about the latest ruling from the high court that vastly expanded executive power.

The high court in a 5-4 ruling Monday blocked Trump’s attempt to fire Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook, deciding that “Congress, not the courts,” must change federal law on removing members of independent agencies, as the ruling said Fed governors are explicitly protected by “for cause” statutes.

But justices handed Trump an expansion of presidential authority as, in a 6-3 ruling, it said that he could fire members of independent regulatory agencies at will, overturning a 91-year-old precedent.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor read the liberals’ dissent at the Supreme Court as the ruling came down Monday, a rare move reserved for extreme disagreements.

Reading aloud from the dissent, she said, “The one thing that does appear to be clear going forward is that chaos will follow.”

In the liberals’ dissent, Sotomayor, along with Kagan and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote that the court had in recent years “reinvigorated a maximalist view of Presidential power.”

“For more than a century, the nation has firmly rejected the majority’s view and has recognized that Congress, not this court, has primary say over whether multi-member commissions like the F.T.C. should have some insulation from direct presidential control,” Sotomayor wrote in a scathing 43-page dissent.

“Seldom, if ever, has this court worked such a profound bait and switch on a coequal branch,” she wrote. “For more than 90 years, Congress believed, with this court’s express approval, that it was allowed to create a workable government, including by granting certain agencies tasked with certain responsibilities some independence from presidential control.”

While Sotomayor hailed the language that carved out the Federal Reserve, she questioned whether that move was truly done in principle.

She wrote, “the majority replaces 90 years of proven, workable practice with a half-baked theory of executive power that is simultaneously all encompassing yet also subject to necessary but undefined exceptions.”

“The result is a President who emerges with far greater power than ever before. It is a power, however, that neither the People, nor Congress, nor the Constitution bestowed upon him,” she wrote. “In granting the President this unbridled authority, the Court upends its precedent, misconstrues our history, and sheds any pretense of judicial modesty.”

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Annabella RosciglioneReporter

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