Justice Jackson Rejects Supreme Court Allowing Trump to Fire Federal Workers

Excerpts from Justice Jackson's dissent in DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, ET AL. v. AMERICAN FEDERATION OF GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES, ET AL.

By Fred Schilling and Jasmin Flores, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States - US Supreme Court, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=163730854

Supreme Court Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the Supreme Court’s decision to grant a stay in the Trump administration’s plans to downsize the federal workforce radically. The Court’s actions allow President Trump to proceed with mass firings.

Justice Jackson’s dissent is compelling. In it, she explains why the Court made a serious misreading of the Constitution that will cause harm to millions of Americans.

The entire decision in Trump v. AFGE is worth reading. Below are excerpts from the decision:

Instead of directing its attention and resources to fully litigating the merits of the challenge to its authority in the courts below, the Government rushed up the chain of review, seeking an emergency stay of the District Court’s preliminary injunction from us. We thus faced the question whether to override the judgments of the two courts below by allowing the President to proceed immediately with implementing his restructuring plans. To answer “no” to that question is simply to preserve the status quo while the lower courts expeditiously decide the lawfulness of the President’s order. To answer “yes”—as the Court now does—is to allow an apparently unprecedented and congressionally unsanctioned dismantling of the Federal Government to continue apace, causing irreparable harm before courts can determine whether the President has the authority to engage in the actions he proposes.

. . .

No one seriously disputes that, if implemented, Executive Order No. 14210 will lead to enormous real-world consequences. This executive action promises mass employee terminations, widespread cancellation of federal programs and services, and the dismantling of much of the Federal Government as Congress has created it. As the Ninth Circuit concluded, the statutory shortfalls likely to result from implementation of this Executive Order will be immensely painful to the general public, and the plaintiffs, in the interim, causing harm that includes “proliferat[ing] foodborne disease,” perpetuating “hazardous environmental conditions,” “eviscerat[ing] disaster loan services for local businesses,” and “drastically reduc[ing] the provision of healthcare and other services to our nation’s veterans.” App. 94a. Preventing those kinds of calamities is just a small slice of the work that federal employees do to carry out Congress’s statutory mandates—work that the Executive Order immediately imperils if implemented.

Consider the harms to democracy, too, if it turns out that the plaintiffs and the lower courts are right that the President is unilaterally changing the structure of the Federal Government. What one person (or President) might call bureaucratic bloat is a farmer’s prospect for a healthy crop, a coal miner’s chance to breathe free from black lung, or a preschooler’s opportunity to learn in a safe environment. The details of the programs that this executive action targets are the product of policy choices that Congress has made—a representative democracy at work. While the President no doubt has the authority to manage the Executive Branch, our system does not allow the President to rewrite laws on his own under the guise of that authority.