This Will Be Corrected When The Merits Are Reached, But The Dissent Tonight Is Correct. Trump Is In The Wrong -- Now And Always.

File this under abuse of the Supremes' own shadow docket -- by Alito/Thomas. Damn. [My earlier backgrounder here.]

I won't spend a lot of time on the idea that this feels like Alito / Thomas and three others handing Trump "a gimme" -- one untethered from precedent (and/or reality).

But it sure looks like that, for these five to avoid being targeted themselves, by Tangerine 2.0's crazier forces -- here's a bit of the fine dissent:

. . .The current President believes that Humphrey’s should be either overruled or confined. See Application 14; Letter from S. Harris, Acting Solicitor General, to Rep. J. Raskin, Re: Restrictions on the Removal of Certain Principal Officers of the United States (Feb. 12, 2025). And he has chosen to act on that belief -- really, to take the law into his own hands. Not since the 1950s (or even before) has a President, without a legitimate reason, tried to remove an officer from a classic independent agency -- a multi-member, bipartisan commission exercising regulatory power whose governing statute contains a for-cause provision. Yet now the President has discharged, concededly without cause, several such officers, including a member of the NLRB (Gwynne Wilcox) and a member of the MSPB (Cathy Harris). Today, this Court effectively blesses those deeds. I would not. Our Humphrey’s decision remains good law, and it forecloses both the President’s firings and the Court’s decision to award emergency relief. . . .

Our emergency docket, while fit for some things, should not be used to overrule or revise existing law. . . . It is one thing to grant relief in that way when doing so vindicates established legal rights, which somehow the courts below have disregarded. It is a wholly different thing to skip the usual appellate process when issuing an order that itself changes the law. See, e.g., Netchoice, LLC v. Paxton, 596 U. S. ___, ___ (2022) (ALITO, J., dissenting from grant of application to vacate stay) (slip op., at 2) (demanding that an applicant for relief have a good claim “under existing law”). . . .

And nowhere is short-circuiting our deliberative process less appropriate than when the ruling requested would disrespect -- by either overturning or narrowing -- one of this Court’s longstanding precedents, like our nearly century-old Humphrey’s decision. Under that decision, this case is easy, as the courts below found: The President has no legal right to relief. Congress, by statute, has protected members of the NLRB and MSPB (like Wilcox and Harris) from Presidential removal except for good cause. See 29 U. S. C. §153(a) . . .

Damnation. Onward, resolutely just the same. I guess we should call this win number 5 -- out of 121, now. Still a terrible Tangerine batting average -- and this was with a corked bat -- to be certain.

नमस्ते