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

[LetMyPeopleVote]

With palpable anger, the Obama appointee read for 20 minutes from her sharp dissent, calling the decision one that “reshapes the structure of government.

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

With palpable anger, the Obama appointee read for 20 minutes from her sharp dissent, calling the decision one that “reshapes the structure of government.”

— Julianne McShane (@juliannemcshane.bsky.social) 2026-06-29T15:44:38.222Z

https://www.ms.now/news/sonia-sotomayor-fiery-dissent-slaughter-case

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.

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 held as 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.”

Alito has been getting pissed at Justice Sotomayor's dissents. It will be interesting to see how Alito reacts

[underpants]

1. Birthright is apparently tomorrow

[LetMyPeopleVote]

2. Samuel Alito's outburst directed at Sonia Sotomayor is part of a troubling trend

The conservative Supreme Court justices seem more concerned about perception and process, rather than the tangible impact of their work.

Link to tweet

https://www.ms.now/opinion/alito-sotomayor-tps-haiti-syria-supreme-court

A highly unusual outburst occurred at the Supreme Court last week. Thursday morning, after Justice Samuel Alito announced the court’s decision in a case regarding asylum policy at the U.S.-Mexico border, Justice Sonia Sotomayor read aloud from her dissent. That in itself is a relatively rare occurrence, but part of the court’s tradition.

Once Sotomayor finished, however, Alito broke from decorum to accuse his colleague of catching him off guard. Alito’s outburst was more than just his latest public display of crankiness. It exemplified a far more insidious trend: the conservative justices on the court treating the loss of comity as some sort of outrage, while ignoring the real-world consequences of their rulings. ....

Beyond this linguistic dispute, what is undoubtedly true is that Alito’s decision will prevent legitimate asylum-seekers from receiving the protection the law was intended to afford them. Reading her dissent from the bench, Sotomayor outlined the difficult path many asylum-seekers face and articulated how our current asylum legal framework sprang from the “moral reckoning that followed the Holocaust and World War II.” She recounted the awful case of the MS St. Louis, when the U.S. refused to accept over 900 Jewish refugees who sailed from Nazi Germany in 1939. More than 250 of those turned away would die in the Holocaust. .....

Yet the conservative justices seem most concerned about perception and process, rather than the tangible impact of their work. Justice Clarence Thomas, for example, bemoaned that the leak of the opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization posed an existential threat to the court’s existence, and indeed, to the country itself. “I wonder how long we’re going to have these institutions at the rate we’re undermining them,” he fretted. “And then I wonder when they’re gone or destabilized, what we’re going to have as a country.”

Fortunately, these attempts to influence public perception of the court and avoid blame for throwing millions of lives into tumult are not working; the American people increasingly see through these efforts. Public approval of the court is at historic lows — nearly 60% of Americans say the Roberts Court is “out of touch with the values and beliefs of most Americans,” and 7 in 10 Americans believe the justices put ideology over impartiality.

[Blue Full Moon]

3. So when there's a democrat president he can fire all of Trump's sycophants.