Supreme Court Faces Heat After Unexplained Rulings for Trump

The US Supreme Court is fueling criticism that it’s treating presidential administrations differently and acting as a partisan partner of Donald Trump in continuing to greenlight his policies without any explanation.

In an order Monday, the court allowed Trump to keep dismantling the Education Department, prompting legal scholars to question how the conservative justices could reach that decision two years after they stopped President Joe Biden from canceling millions in federal student loan debt.

It’s really hard to square that order with what they did to Biden’s student loan plan, said University of Michigan Law professor Samuel Bagenstos. He noted the court in 2023 kept Biden’s debt-relief program on hold and moved his emergency request to implement it over to its merits docket for full briefing and argument on whether the president had the authority to implement the program.

“Here, rather than keep the president’s action on hold while they consider the merits of whether he can take this action eviscerating the Department of Education, they reached out to grant a stay to allow Trump to act immediately,” Bagenstos said.

‘Lot of Frustration’

The unsigned ruling from the divided court means the Trump administration doesn’t have to reinstate nearly 1,400 Education Department employees. In a dissenting opinion from the court’s liberals, Justice Sonia Sotomayor accused her conservative colleagues of expediting Trump’s plan to break the law and abolish the department without congressional approval.

“It hands the Executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out,” she said, calling the court’s ruling a “misuse of our emergency docket.”

The majority could have concluded that the local school districts, unions, and states don’t have the legal injury or standing needed to challenge the administration’s cuts to the department, said Nicholas Handler, a Texas A&M University associate law professor.

“A lot of the frustration, I think, that people are expressing here is we just don’t know,” he said. “We don’t know what issue they decided this on, we don’t know what their reasoning was.”

On Biden’s student loan relief plan, the court ultimately ruled Biden was unlawfully “seizing the power of the legislature” after finding the state challengers had standing to sue. Without any explanation from the court, it’s not clear why the court now thinks Trump isn’t doing the same in making massive cuts to the Education Department.

“Maybe there’s some great argument as to the merits and the standing here that I’m not aware of that could plausibly justify this ruling, but the court hasn’t even previewed it,” Handler said. “It’s fair for people to be very frustrated and feel like there are at least questions as to why the court is behaving this way when it seems to have behaved very differently during the Biden administration.”

Rationales Routinely Missing

The second Trump administration has had an extraordinary track record on the court’s so-called shadow docket, according to Georgetown Law professor Stephen Vladeck.

The Supreme Court ruled against the president in some of his early requests, including efforts to slash federal funding and deport migrants without adequate safeguards.

Since April, the justices have sided with Trump in all 15 rulings it has issued on the president’s emergency requests, Vladeck said in a social media post. That includes requests on immigration, the firing of federal workers, and the dismissal of transgender military service members.

Of those 15 rulings, the court has only written three majority opinions, Vladeck said, noting that seven have come with no explanation at all.

Josh Blackman, a professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston, said the majority’s decision not to explain its reasoning is problematic, particularly in the latest ruling on education workers.

Blackman noted that the briefing in the case was completed June 16. So they “had plenty of time to figure something out,” he said. The fact that they didn’t write a decision explaining their ruling suggests the justices in the majority may not have been able to agree on a rationale for siding with the Trump administration and that they’d “prefer to simply issue a summary order without explanation,” he said.

The unprecedented number of emergency petitions from the administration and the lack of an explanation or even vote counts indicating how the justices voted isn’t normal, said Dalié Jiménez, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine who filed a brief in support of Biden’s student loan program.

“The court is absolutely behaving differently when it comes to the Trump administration,” she said.