This Is One Hell of a Quiet Coup
The Supreme Court just pulled a move that feels like a magic trick—except the rabbit they yanked from the hat is the power to blow up an entire federal agency without a single vote in Congress. In an unsigned, unexplained “shadow docket” order, the Court cleared the way for the president to sack massive chunks of the Department of Education’s staff, leaving the place a hollow shell. No oral arguments, no written reasoning, no daylight. Boom.
Why You Should Give a Damn
Congress created the Department of Education back in ’79. Under the Constitution, only Congress can kill it. Yet by letting the president fire everyone who makes the department run, the Court just handed the executive branch a cheat code to erase laws it doesn’t like. Picture every civil-rights investigator, every special-education watchdog, every bean-counter making sure your kid’s Pell Grant shows up—gone. The programs may still exist on paper, but the people who keep them alive are out the door, taking decades of expertise with them.
It doesn’t stop at education. If this stands, any future president—left, right, or full-blown authoritarian—can kneecap the EPA, OSHA, even the damn VA, simply by ordering mass pink slips. That’s not policy debate; that’s administrative arson.
Connecting the Dots
This is part of a broader pattern where the Court’s conservative majority keeps using the shadow docket—those late-night, unsigned rulings—to give the White House a free pass to bulldoze established law. Immigration rules, environmental safeguards, LGBTQ protections—the Court has let all sorts of big-ticket items slide through emergency orders that never face full scrutiny. By the time lower courts weigh in, the damage is already baked in.
And let’s be blunt: destroying an agency from within is a lot sexier to would-be strongmen than slogging through Congress. You don’t need votes, hearings, or headline-grabbing vetoes. You just need a Court willing to shrug and say, “Sure, fire ’em all.”
Where This Leaves Us
We’re staring at a constitutional time bomb. The separation of powers only works if each branch respects its damn lane. When the judiciary lets the executive hack away at laws Congress has enacted, the whole balance tilts toward a wannabe monarch with a pen and a pink-slip printer.
So what do we do? Raise holy hell—loudly, publicly, and nonstop. Demand that Congress reclaim its turf by forcing transparency on the shadow docket. Flood your reps with calls. Drag this story into every school-board meeting, PTA gathering, and veterans’ hall (yeah, I know, no one cares about D.C. process until their kid’s financial aid disappears). Make it politically toxic for any branch to screw with agencies in the dark.
Because if we let this slide, the next time the president wants to nuke an agency, it’ll happen faster than you can say, “What the hell just happened?” And by then, the constitutional guardrails will be nothing but scrap metal.
Stay angry, stay loud, and don’t let the bastards burn the place down while we’re looking the other way.