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

Justice Sonia Sotomayor delivered a fiery dissent Monday against 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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Sotomayor spent nearly 20 minutes reading her dissent from the bench — an uncommon practice, though not the first time she has done so recently — in Trump v. Slaughter.

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.”

As a result of the decision, Sotomayor wrote, “dozens of independent commissions are now likely to become purely executive agencies, shifting tremendous power over broad swaths of American life into the President’s hands.”

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.”