The Conservative Justices Are Too Cowardly to Say What They Mean - Jay Willis @ Balls and Strikes

[In It to Win It]

Balls and Strikes

On Monday, in an unsigned, one-paragraph order, the Supreme Court’s six conservatives allowed President Donald Trump to functionally dismantle the Department of Education. The Court’s shadow docket decision in this case, McMahon v. New York, should not be confused with the Court’s other, similarly brief shadow docket decisions that allowed Trump to unilaterally fire tens of thousands of federal workers, ship noncitizens to dangerous countries without meaningful process, remove independent agency officials without cause, purge the military of trans people, and turn over your private data to a teenager named Big Balls. I want to stress that this is not an exhaustive list of recent cases in which the conservatives have given their favorite president permission to rewrite the law as he sees fit, but I have to end this paragraph sometime.

In her dissent for the three liberals, Justice Sonia Sotomayor sounded as if she still could not believe the hamfisted scheme the majority was sanctioning. By taking Secretary of Education Linda McMahon at her word that she is merely “reorganizing” the department by firing more than 2,000 of its employees, Sotomayor wrote, the Court had “handed the Executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out.” She concluded: “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.”

Given how gleefully the Court has spent the first few months of the second Trump administration rolling over and showing its belly at his request, it is already challenging to remember that during the first Trump administration, the Court occasionally expressed unease with the White House’s ungainly attempts to translate contemptuous lawlessness into erudite legalese. At the time, the alliance between establishment conservatives, evangelical Christians, Make America Great Again sycophants, and terminally online racists was still new and relatively fragile. Both Trump and Chief Justice John Roberts viewed themselves as the true leaders of the American right, and the presence of the other as a sort of momentary inconvenience.

But to the extent that the Court was once reluctant to endorse every stupid, lazy legal argument the Trump White House coughed up, it is not anymore. The five-justice conservative majority of Trump’s first term is now a six-justice conservative supermajority whose members, like all Republicans who are still relevant in Republican politics, have spent the past eight years fully acclimating to their roles as obedient Trump supplicants. To them, every hour that Mister Trump cannot implement their shared policy agenda is a dire legal emergency, and no task is more urgent than giving him everything he asks for, and apologizing for whichever extremely rude district court judge had the temerity to temporarily rule otherwise.

At a very basic level, the Supreme Court issuing a one-paragraph decision allowing Trump to nuke the Department of Education should profoundly embarrassing stuff. The conservative justices have the votes to do whatever they want, but they are still too chickenshit to put their names to it.

— Jay Willis (@jaywillis.net) 2025-07-15T17:01:20.884Z

The Court doing weighty, heinous things isn't new, but they used to at least write more than a single fucking paragraph explaining themselves. This conservative supermajority can't be bothered. They are just giving Mister Trump what he wants, and calling it a day. ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/mcmah...

— Jay Willis (@jaywillis.net) 2025-07-15T17:06:02.487Z

[Irish_Dem]

1. They are lazy cowards. Don't even bother to show their work.

Destroying their country and Americans are child's play for them.

[B.See]

2. It isn't 'cowardice' it's

COMPLICITLY. SCOTUS conservatives are no longer even PRETENDING to be about precedent, jurisprudence, constitutionality, OR rule of law.

As I've said before, they're lawless THUGS in robes.

[Kid Berwyn]

3. They're getting paid while the money's still good.

A lot, evidently.