Sotomayor Warns Supreme Court Gave Trump the Powers of a King
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor slammed her conservative colleagues on Monday for making President Donald Trump more powerful than a king.The Supreme Court’s conservative majority scrapped Humphrey’s Executor v. United States—a high court precedent that allowed Congress to limit the president’s ability to fire officials at independent federal agencies—and allowed Trump to remove Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission.In a scathing dissent, joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan, Sotomayor warned that Trump had just become more powerful than the English monarch, whose Parliament “often restricted the Crown’s ability to remove even high-level royal officers.”“The text of the Constitution, along with its history, the longstanding practices of the political branches, and the precedents of this Court, make clear that Congress may limit the causes for which the heads of Commissions like the FTC can be removed by the President,” Sotomayor wrote. “In holding otherwise, the Court gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once-coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.”Sotomayor argued that there was simply no way that the decision was constitutional because the country’s founding Framers had “‘never intended’ to give the President ‘the complete set of powers’ that the English Crown held, let alone more.”