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I drew the above about six years ago, I don’t recall the context. It’s a cartoon meant to make you smile, and doesn’t reflect my attitude towards men, nor do I want anyone on the court to lose their life. As we know, and these little girls will learn, not all women are like-minded, nor are all men.
The Supreme Court ruled on a few cases yesterday, more will come later today:
—state laws allowing ballots to arrive after Election Day are legal. The decision is the latest in a series of setbacks for Trump’s efforts to regulate elections. This is a big relief.
—in favor of E. Jean Carroll, again. They declined a request by Trump to review a $5 million civil judgment against him after a jury found in 2023 that he sexually abused and defamed her. No reasoning or dissent reported. This is terrific news not only for E Jean, but for women around the country
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—Trump can now fire government independent regulators for any reason, but the ruling explicitly affirmed the Fed’s independence and said its leaders could not be fired at will. This expands presidential power, the three liberal justices dissented. Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in her dissent that the majority’s ruling would unleash “chaos” by transforming independent agencies, undoing centuries of political practice and concluding that “all three branches of government have been acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time.” This ruling overturns “90 years of court precedent curbing executive power.” Experts are quite upset about this.
Economist Paul Krugman in his Substack this morning calls the ruling “alarming.”
The case ruling on Slaughter v Trump began in 2025. Rebecca Slaughter was the last Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, and Trump fired her without cause. Since 1935 the Supreme Court has said the president does not have the power to fire members of independent agencies created by Congress, except for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” What this ruling allows is for a president to gut the agencies in Congress that protect us, and fill them with loyalists.
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The three dissenters, Justices Brown Jackson, Kagan and Sotomayor, argued that the some agencies that make our government run should not be politically based. Financial management, workplace safety, consumer safety, addressing environmental hazards, and managing nuclear energy, for example, should not depend “on who is in office—much less on who is disfavored or owed a favor by those in office—but also on judgment, expertise, and the public good.” Their dissent went on:
“Since the founding, Congress has created agencies that in various ways have embodied this goal of independence. Over the last 140 years especially, the political branches have done so by establishing agencies like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC): bipartisan, multimember bodies with “for-cause” removal protections. This structure allows the agencies to address complex problems while enjoying some independence from Presidential removal and thus absolute partisan control.”
“Today,” though, they write, “this Court undoes centuries of political practice and concludes that all three branches of Government have been acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time. Its conclusion is wrong…. [T]he 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.”
Lisa Graves, founder and Executive Director of True North Research, a national investigative watchdog group, spoke with Krugman last night. She said that this ruling “has enormous implications for the American people and American consumers, because, in essence, consolidating power in this way in a president is not required by the Constitution.”
The question I ask is: with this newfound power given to Trump by the Roberts court, how much damage can Trump do before the midterms? Because I am hopeful that after the midterms we will be impeaching him and maybe that will restrict his actions.
What this ruling will do, I believe, is fire up those who believe this is wrong, and we will elect an incredibly strong Congress to undo so much.
I hope you have an okay Tuesday, considering the news. I remain hopeful, this will not set us back, but rather empower us.
See you later, thank you so very much for being here.