Justice Sonia Sotomayor used one of the court's strongest protest tools Monday: a lengthy dissent read aloud from the bench. (It's the second time in a week she has deployed the rare move.) On Monday, Sotomayor blasted the Supreme Court's ruling that presidents may dismiss leaders of independent agencies at will, warning that it "promises to unleash only chaos," reports the New York Times. She accused the majority of dismantling long-standing checks on presidential power.
"Today, 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," she declared as Chief Justice John Roberts, author of the 6-3 majority opinion, looked on. Joined by Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sotomayor argued that Congress has long had authority to give multi-member commissions like the Federal Trade Commission some insulation from political pressure, per SCOTUSblog.
She said the ruling tosses aside a 1935 precedent, Humphrey's Executor, in what she called a "profound bait and switch" on Congress, replacing "90 years of proven, workable practice" with what she described as a sweeping, ill-defined theory of executive power. She noted the opinion's carve-out for the Federal Reserve but questioned whether that exception had any principled basis. Roberts, meanwhile, wrote that "the FTC unquestionably exercises executive power, and must therefore be controlled" by the president.
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