King Donald? Supreme Court grants Trump power to repeal laws at his whim

[Celerity]

https://thehill.com/opinion/education/5402908-king-donald-supreme-court-grants-trump-power-to-repeal-laws-at-his-whim/

“The executive has seized for itself the power to repeal federal law by way of mass terminations, in direct contravention of the Take Care Clause and our Constitution’s separation of powers.” Read that again. These are the words of Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a dissenting opinion to the Supreme Court’s one-paragraph July 14 ruling, in which the majority basically held — without any justification or explanation whatsoever — that it’s fine that America has become a land of lawlessness with power consolidated in one person.

President Trump is the law now.

The case is McMahon v. New York, and it involves Trump’s stated plan to abolish the Department of Education by basically firing half of its workforce so that it cannot function. Unlike Elon Musk’s slash-and-burn DOGE experiment, this maneuver is not even thinly disguised by the pretense of government “efficiency.” Trump just wants the Department of Education to go. The trouble is that, as a matter of the Constitution’s core separation of powers, Congress makes the laws. In 1979, Congress enacted the Department of Education Organization Act for purposes of “ensuring access to equal educational opportunity for every individual.”

As Sotomayor explained in her dissent, which Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined, “only Congress has the power to abolish the department. The executive’s task, by contrast, is to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.’” By shutting down the Department of Education “by executive fiat,” Trump is blatantly intruding on the powers of the legislature to make the laws while ignoring the constitutional mandate, and his oath of office, that he duly execute those laws.

Trump’s plan ignores a bunch of other laws that the Department of Education is also responsible for executing, including laws governing federal grants for institutes of higher education; federal funding for kindergarten through high school (more than $100 billion during the 2020-2021 school year, or 11 percent of the total funding for public K-12 schools across the country); and laws banning discrimination in federally-funded schools on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex and disability.

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