Fresh from the Independence Day weekend, the U.S. Supreme Court is handing President Donald Trump another victory, backing his administration in downsizing the federal bureaucracy.

Eight of the Supreme Court’s nine justices agreed Tuesday to halt a lower court’s order declaring the Trump administration’s move to initiate large-scale layoffs to be “unlawful.” A coalition of unions representing government employees had sued to block a Trump executive order instructing various federal departments and agencies to plan for mass layoffs. When Judge Susan Illston of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California agreed and declared the executive order “unlawful,” the injunction halted the Trump administration from articulating plans for workforce reductions.

The Supreme Court took a different view, however, and determined that the executive order was not “unlawful,” although the majority of justices noted that they “express no view on the legality of” workforce reduction plans put together according to the executive order. They warned, “The District Court enjoined further implementation or approval of the plans based on its view about the illegality of the Executive Order and Memorandum, not on any assessment of the plans themselves.” Because Illston blocked the executive order, prohibiting administration officials from crafting workforce reduction plans, instead of waiting for those plans to take place and then determining if they were unlawful, the Supreme Court observed that “[t]hose plans are not before this Court” and can thus go into effect.

In comments to The Washington Stand, Hans Von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, explained, “The Supreme Court has correctly stayed the injunction of another rogue federal judge, this time in California, who claimed that the president cannot terminate federal employees.” He added, “The idea that the constitutional head of the executive branch doesn’t have the authority to supervise, hire, discipline, or terminate employees within the executive branch is absurd.”

Von Spakovsky continued, “In its order, the Supreme Court recognized that the government is ‘likely to succeed on its argument’ that Trump’s actions are ‘lawful.’ Therefore, the injunction was improperly and unlawfully granted.” The legal scholar noted, “The only dissenter was Justice Jackson, who once again issued a hyperbolic, ‘the sky is falling’ dissent without any basis in the law or the Constitution.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Biden appointee, penned a lengthy, 14-page dissent, arguing that the president does not have the legal authority to direct the executive branch agencies under his control. “Under our Constitution, Congress has the power to establish administrative agencies and detail their functions. Thus, over the past century, Presidents who have attempted to reorganize the Federal Government have first obtained authorization from Congress to do so,” Jackson wrote, averring that Trump “sharply departed from that settled practice” and is “arrogating this power to himself.” Jackson wrote that Illston “made a reasoned determination” in issuing her injunction, adding, “But that temporary, practical, harm-reducing preservation of the status quo was no match for this Court’s demonstrated enthusiasm for greenlighting this President’s legally dubious actions in an emergency posture.”

Long considered one of the most vocally progressive members of the Supreme Court, Obama-appointed Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who sided with the majority in this decision, publicly reprimanded Jackson in a concurring opinion. “I agree with Justice Jackson that the President cannot restructure federal agencies in a manner inconsistent with congressional mandates,” Sotomayor began. “Here, however, the relevant Executive Order directs agencies to plan reorganizations and reductions in force ‘consistent with applicable law,’” she noted. Referring to the substance of Jackson’s dissent, Sotomayor continued, “The plans themselves are not before this Court, at this stage, and we thus have no occasion to consider whether they can and will be carried out consistent with the constraints of law.” She added, “I join the Court’s stay because it leaves the District Court free to consider those questions in the first instance.”

Sotomayor’s rebuke of Jackson’s judicial reasoning follows Justice Amy Coney Barrett authoring a blunt evisceration of Jackson’s reasoning less than two weeks prior. “We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself,” Barrett wrote. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh all joined Barrett’s opinion, including her scathing critique of Jackson’s legal arguments.