SCOTUS: Mass Firings At Education Department Can Continue
SCOTUS Rules Mass Firings At Education Department To Continue
I’ll give the GOP one thing: they are abundantly clear-eyed that their only path to maintaining power comes from keeping the American population as uneducated as possible. While the Trump administration is actively gutting the federal government across the board, the Education Department is one of its most pronounced targets. While a lower court ruling placed an indefinite hold on mass firings at the Education Department, a ruling by the Supreme Court on Monday allows the Trump administration to follow through with its plan.
According to CNN, the Education Department sent a letter to employees informing them that layoffs will resume only hours after the Supreme Court issued its unsigned order. The Education Department attempted to fire 1,300 employees in March before the move was blocked by the lower court ruling. Some of the employees who were part of the group originally set to be fired received a notice that their last day will be Aug. 1.
“The Department appreciates your service and recognizes the difficulty of the moment,” the notice states. “This RIF action is not a reflection upon your performance or conduct and is solely due to agency restructuring, as described in previous correspondence.”
When America at least tried to act like a constitutional republic, the power to dismantle federal agencies lay solely with Congress. In the past, several of the conservative Supreme Court judges have labeled themselves “Originalists,” arguing that their rulings are rooted in what the founders originally intended in the Constitution.
Unsurprisingly, that was a lie.
The conservative judges’ rulings have instead fallen more in line with the Unitary Executive Theory, which posits the president holds sole power over the executive branch and essentially allows him to act like a king. Which, you know, is kind of the exact scenario the founders designed the Constitution to prevent.
“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,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the dissent, which was signed by the other two liberal justices. Sotomayor added that the layoffs “will unleash untold harm, delaying or denying educational opportunities and leaving students to suffer from discrimination, sexual assault, and other civil rights violations without the federal resources Congress intended.”
To Sotomayor’s last point, the Education Department is already coming under scrutiny for dismissing an alarming number of civil rights cases during Trump’s short tenure in office. The department released court documents revealing its Office for Civil Rights dismissed 3,424 complaints between March 11 and June 27, “consistent with OCR’s Case Processing Manual.”
From Politico:
By contrast, during the last three months of the Biden administration, OCR dismissed 2,527 cases, resolved 449 with resolution agreements for change, secured 146 successful mediations, and determined there was no violation in 119 cases.
The difference between the number of mediated or voluntary resolution cases recorded in the last three months of the Biden administration, when compared to the number of resolutions disclosed by the Trump administration within three months earlier this year, “reflects a shocking diminution of work output from the office,” Lhamon said.
One former agency official, granted anonymity due to fear of retaliation from the Trump administration, was stunned by the new data.
“That amount of dismissals in a three-month period is unheard of,” the former official, who worked in OCR and was at the department for about 20 years, said. “If they dismiss that amount of cases in a matter of three months, then they’re not following the procedures. What it sounds like they’re doing to me is they’re just dismissing cases that they don’t want to take the time to investigate, or put the resources into.”
Under Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s leadership, the Education Department’s Civil Rights Office is investigating schools that they believe aren’t complying with Trump’s executive order banning DEI in higher education. These investigations have already resulted in several schools removing their DEI offices and a university president resigning from his role. The Civil Rights Office isn’t resting on its laurels; it’s simply ignoring cases that don’t fit Trump’s ideological agenda.
Though with these mass layoffs, it remains to be seen how effective they’ll be in pursuing those investigations. These are not people who think about the long-term consequences of their actions. While the layoffs and legal maneuvers will undoubtedly hurt so many Black, brown, LGBTQ, and special needs students, they could ultimately hamper the Trump administration’s ability to carry out these investigations into universities.
We’ve already seen how the Trump administration’s cuts to the National Weather Service (NWS) of FEMA hampered its response to the recent floods in Texas. Heck, the administration is still trying to rehire people to fill critical roles that were made vacant during the reckless, DOGE-mandated layoffs during the administration’s early months.
This is all objectively terrible and depressing, but time will tell if this is yet another unforced error by an administration exceptionally good at making them.
SEE ALSO:
Black Academic Programs Under Direct Threat From DOE
SCOTUS Rules Mass Firings At Education Department To Continue was originally published on newsone.com
