Joshua P. Steele

Justice Kagan, dissenting in Trump v. Slaughter:

“On top of granting certiorari before judgment in this case, the Court today issues a stay enabling the President to immediately discharge, without any cause, a member of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). That stay, granted on our emergency docket, is just the latest in a series. Earlier this year, the same majority, by the same mechanism, permitted the President to fire without cause members of the National Labor Relations Board, the Merits Systems Protection Board, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. … Congress, as everyone agrees, prohibited each of those presidential removals. … Under the relevant statutes, the entities just listed are “classic independent agenc[ies]"—"‘multi-member, bipartisan commission[s]’ whose members serve staggered terms and cannot be removed except for good reason.” … Yet the majority, stay order by stay order, has handed full control of all those agencies to the President. He may now remove—so says the majority, though Congress said differently—any member he wishes, for any reason or no reason at all. And he may thereby extinguish the agencies' bipartisanship and independence.

I dissented from the majority’s prior stay orders, and today do so again. Under existing law, what Congress said goes—as this Court unanimously decided nearly a century ago. In Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, we rejected a claim of presidential prerogative identical to the one made in this case. … Congress, we held, may restrict the President’s power to remove members of the FTC, as well as other agencies performing “quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial” functions, without violating the Constitution. … To reach a different result requires reversing the rule stated in Humphrey’s: It entails overriding rather than accepting Congress’s judgment about agency design. … Because the majority’s stay does just that, I respectfully dissent. Our emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars. Still more, it should not be used, as it also has been, to transfer government authority from Congress to the President, and thus to reshape the Nation’s separation of powers.”

From Isaac Bradshaw via Bluesky:

Ultimately the split in US politics is between those who bear false witness against their neighbors for gain - and those who do not. The end state of this sort of split is what we see now, where there can be no compromise because there is not a common grasp of reality.

It is ultimately impossible to civilly disagree over policy when you are enabled to choose your own reality based on consumer preference.