Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court made a highly controversial move this week, giving the Trump administration a green light to move forward with its plans to dismantle the Education Department. Justice Sonia Sotomayor was not at all impressed.
“When the Executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the Judiciary’s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it,” the progressive jurist wrote in a dissent. Sotomayor described the majority’s decision as “indefensible,” adding that it “hands the Executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out. The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive, but either way the threat to our Constitution’s separation of powers is grave.”
I would gladly highlight the Republican-appointed justices’ rationale for ruling the other way, but there was no stated rationale: They simply issued a brief, unsigned order.
The New York Times noted soon after that this has happened quite a bit lately.
In clearing the way for President Trump’s efforts to transform American government, the Supreme Court has issued a series of orders that often lacked a fundamental characteristic of most judicial work: an explanation of the court’s rationale. … The court has allowed the administration to fire tens of thousands of government workers, discharge transgender troops, end protections for hundreds of thousands of migrants from war-torn countries and fundamentally shift power from Congress to the president — often with scant or no explanation of how it arrived at those results.
Citing research from Georgetown Law professor Stephen Vladeck, an expert on the high court’s “shadow docket,” the Times’ report noted that in the past 10 weeks alone, the Supreme Court has “granted emergency relief to the Trump administration without explanation seven times.”
The order on the gutting of the Education Department, the analysis added, “was an exercise of power, not reason.”
It was against this backdrop that the latest national poll from Quinnipiac University included an important question: “In general, do you think that the Supreme Court is mainly motivated by politics or mainly motivated by the law?”
The results were not close: 63% said the high court is principally focused on politics, while 30% said the justices prioritize the law.
This follows a series of related national surveys showing public trust in the Supreme Court as an institution reaching record lows.
It’s tempting to assume that the justices won’t care since they’re not in elected positions, but as regular readers know, it was a few years ago when Justice Amy Coney Barrett made a public appearance in which the conservative jurist declared: “My goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.”
In 2023, Justice Brett Kavanaugh made similar comments, insisting that the Supreme Court is “an institution of law not of politics, not of partisanship.” The conservative added that he believes that the current lineup of justices has succeeded in “deciding cases based on law and not based on partisan affiliation and partisanship.”
Apparently, those declarations aren’t persuading much of the American mainstream. In 2021, a national Grinnell College/Selzer poll similarly found that nearly two-thirds of Americans agree that politics drives Supreme Court rulings. Grinnell College National Poll Director Peter Hanson said at the time, “This is a nightmare scenario for Chief Justice John Roberts, who has sought to protect the court’s reputation as an apolitical institution.” Four years later, this “nightmare scenario” is ongoing. The tarnishing of the Supreme Court — its credibility, its integrity and its reputation — has unfolded episodically over the course of several years. When far-right justices issue regressive and reactionary rulings, the problem gets worse. When far-right justices get caught up in indefensible ethics controversies, the problem gets worse. When far-right justices deliver political speeches, the problem gets worse. When far-right justices do favors for political allies, the problem gets worse. When far-right justices sit down with conservative media personalities, the problem gets worse. What’s more, there’s no reason to assume conditions will improve any time soon, as this week’s developments make clear. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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