WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court has allowed President Trump to destroy union contracts covering a million federal workers by nullifying a lower court hold on his mass firings and destruction of numerous government agencies. By sending the lawsuit by unions back down to lower courts for a trial, the High Court effectively allows the Trump administration, while disregarding Congress, to carry out its destruction of the federal workforce and the agencies they operate.
The court’s sole dissenter, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, pointed out that the decision allows unconstitutional behavior because it permits the president to kill programs and government infrastructure put in place by Congress, the only branch of government the Constitution allows to write laws.
She also said the ruling will let Trump deprive people of basic government services. The court majority, she declared, calls Trump’s executive order against the unions and workers lawful “by ignoring what the government is actually doing,” firing thousands of workers and smashing agencies put in place by laws enacted by Congress.
The justice predicted the harm from the majority’s ruling “will be immensely painful to the general public.” Harms “include proliferating foodborne disease, perpetuating hazardous environmental conditions, eviscerating disaster loan services for local businesses, and drastically reducing healthcare and other services to our nation’s veterans,” she wrote.
“Preventing those kinds of calamities is just a small slice of the work that federal employees do to carry out Congress’s statutory mandates—work” that Trump’s “executive order immediately imperils if implemented…What one person (or president) might call bureaucratic bloat is a farmer’s prospect for a healthy crop, a coal miner’s chance to breathe free from black lung, or a preschooler’s opportunity to learn in a safe environment.”
Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, at the federation’s launching of a nationwide bus tour today, called the ruling “the biggest case of union busting in U.S. history.” Union leaders stationed a big bus in D.C. today at the start of their two-month tour of the country.
The first topic of their “Freedom, Fairness And Security” tour will be President Trump’s “big, bad bill”—their words—which gives a $4.5 trillion tax cut bonanza to corporations and the 1%, at the expense of everybody else.
Continue to sow chaos
“As politicians continue to sow chaos for working people and big corporations profit off of our backs, the AFL-CIO will spend the two months leading up to Labor Day crisscrossing the country to provide voice to and build power with workers,” the federation said. They plan “to engage workers on the issues facing their communities, their fights to organize and win fair contracts, and the impact of the Trump administration policies on their lives.” That especially includes the tax cut and program cut, too.
The second topic will be the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing Trump’s destruction of union contracts and the massive firings of workers and dismantling of agencies.”
The Supreme Court ruling is important not just to federal workers. Shuler predicted, months ago, that after the union-hating GOP president first smashes the federal workers and their agencies, he’ll go after everybody else. And in his first term, Trump’s right-wing White House staff was open about that goal.
Also on the chopping block from the court ruling and potential firings are food safety, clean water, and the fight against further pandemics, among other perils, says AFSCME President Lee Saunders.
Workers, public interest groups, and their allies campaigned long and hard to stop the big bad bill for all the reasons Shuler cited, and more. The AFL-CIO leaders riding the bus plan to talk about how Trump’s “big bad bill” will throw 17 million people out of health insurance through a Medicaid cut, slash Obamacare by $300 billion and endanger Social Security’s finances, all over the next decade.
Trump’s bill also turns his masked and hooded Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents loose even more to indiscriminately round up people, including adults and children, beat them up, and handcuff them. ICE gets a $135 billion budget boost.
One of the most critical things pointed out by Justice Brown-Jackson is the nullification by Trump and now the Supreme Court of the role of Congress. Pundits and defenders of unbridled executive power are fond of describing what they call “three co-equal branches of government created by the Constitution. As Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin has frequently noted, this is not the case.
The Congress is clearly created in the Constitution as the first and most important branch of government. It involves the direct representatives of the people writing the laws of the land. The role of the president, the executive branch, is to carry out the laws written by Congress, and the role of the courts is to ensure that the laws are interpreted correctly. Each of the three branches has its own special roles, the “checks and balances.” But the role of the Congress is pre-eminent.
The Supreme Court, meanwhile, gave Trump free rein to not only trash union contracts covering a million federal workers but to yank union protections from them, too. That means he can fire workers and replace them with anyone he pleases, while endangering the services federal workers provide.
That was another of Justice Jackson’s key points, along with the fact that Trump’s executive order for the contract trashing and the worker firing is a blatant violation of the Constitution.
“With scant justification, the majority permits immediate and potentially devastating aggrandizement of one branch (the executive) at the expense of another (Congress), and once again leaves the people paying the price for its reckless emergency determinations,” Jackson wrote.
Shuler joined Justice Jackson in providing details. Trump “created chaos in hundreds of thousands of federal workers’ lives, and the Supreme Court just heaped on more pain. These are the workers who care for our veterans, make sure our food is safe to eat, protect our health and safety on the job, and deliver the essential services we all rely on daily,” the AFL-CIO leader said.
Track and respond to disasters
“They track and respond to natural disasters, support our public school educators and ensure our water is clean. Now, the Supreme Court has given the Trump-appointed authors of Project 2025 permission to throw these workers out of their jobs and cleared the way for even more mass firings,” while lower court hearings on union lawsuits against Trump’s ruling proceed, Shuler added.
Justice Jackson pointed out that once an agency is smashed and its functions and programs trashed, it will be almost impossible to reassemble everything, even if the unions, the AFL-CIO, the Government Employees, AFSCME, the Treasury Employees, and other unions eventually win on the merits.
“Consider the harms to democracy, too, if it turns out the plaintiffs”—the unions—”and the lower courts are right that the president is unilaterally changing the structure of the federal government,” Justice Jackson stated. “Details of the programs this executive action targets are the product of policy choices Congress made—a representative democracy at work.
“While the president no doubt has the authority to manage the executive branch, our system does not allow the president to rewrite laws on his own under the guise of that authority. The president’s power, if any, to issue an executive order must stem either from an act of Congress or from the Constitution itself.
“This constraint on the president is protective of democracy, not an impediment to it.”
Shuler said Trump’s dictates are unpopular, too—a point apparent in the few town hall meetings Congress’s ruling Republicans hosted. Constituents in deep-red districts and states booed and jeered their lawmakers and shouted some of them down.
“The American people do not support this” big bad bill, Shuler said. “By a two-to-one margin, people oppose the reckless firing of federal workers. And when 85% live outside of D.C and 30% are veterans, it’s working families across the country who will be harmed by allowing these firings to move forward—in ways we can’t even know yet.
“And we will continue to organize and support federal worker unions in their vital work, because it’s clear that a union contract is more important now than ever. This decision is a blow, but the litigation in this case—and the fight for federal workers and the essential services they provide—is far from over.”
Those will be the messages from the riders of the AFL-CIO’s bus. First stop: Newport News, Va., near the federal shipyards there. The shipyard workers are members of Redmond’s union, Steelworkers Local 8888. The Virginia topic will be the impact on veterans. There’s also a large VA hospital in nearby Hampton Roads. The Government Employees represents its workers.
Justice Jackson’s dissent to the ruling of her colleagues on the Court amounted to a scathing and blistering attack on their reasoning. She accused them of allowing Trump to “take a wrecking ball to the Federal Government” before the constitutionality of his actions has been ruled upon by the courts.
“Given the fact-based nature of the issue in this case and the many serious harms that result from allowing the president to dramatically reconfigure the Federal Government, it was eminently reasonable for the District Court to maintain the status quo while the courts evaluate the lawfulness of the president’s executive actions.
“At bottom, this case is about whether those actions amount to structural overhaul that usurps Congress’s policy-making prerogatives – and it is hard to imagine deciding that question in any meaningful way after those changes have happened,” she added. “Yet, for some reason, this Court sees fit to step in now and release the president’s wrecking ball at the outset of the litigation.”
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