A CRASH COURSE IN ARTICLE II. Among other things, the second Trump administration is giving the political world an education in the meaning of Article II of the Constitution, the article that establishes the executive branch and lays out the president’s powers. A lot of people do not like what they are learning.
“The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America,” it begins. The article outlines the process for electing the president, establishes qualifications for office, creates the oath of office, and details the process for removing the president. It lists the president’s powers, both sole powers, such as serving as commander in chief of the military and the power to pardon, and powers he exercises with the advice and consent of the Senate, such as making treaties, appointing judges, and appointing officers of the United States. Article II also says the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
Donald Trump came into office in January knowing that his opposition — Democrats, their associated activist groups, lawfare specialists, and media allies — would do everything they could to stop his initiatives. Before the recent passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which is Trump’s sole, albeit really big, legislative achievement to date, all of Trump’s accomplishments in his first months in office have come through his exercise of the executive authority laid out in Article II.
The most successful strategy the anti-Trump coalition has used so far is what might be called Lawfare 2.0. For years, the coalition pursued impeachment, lawsuits, and criminal investigations against Trump. Now, it is filing lawsuit after lawsuit to stop specific Trump initiatives. It has had extraordinary success at the lower-court level, with many compliant judges enjoining the administration from doing what the president ordered.
But at some point, Trump’s adversaries run into Article II: “The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States.” The president is the chief executive, and he runs the executive branch. Yes, Congress writes the law, creates agencies, funds them, and requires them to perform certain functions. But the president runs them — he executes the law. In the real world of government, that means the president and his appointees are responsible for the implementation and administration of everything the executive branch does.
That simple fact has become a huge problem for the forces trying to stop Trump’s efforts to downsize executive branch agencies. The latest example is the Supreme Court decision allowing Trump to lay off 1,378 employees at the Department of Education.
Shortly after the cuts were announced, in March, the Democratic attorneys general of several states sued Education Secretary Linda McMahon. Their argument was that the Department of Education is “essential” and that it could only perform its “essential” role with the 4,133 people who worked there as of Jan. 20, 2025 — that is, on President Joe Biden’s last day in office. By the time of the order, in March, 572 of the department’s employees had accepted a buyout. McMahon proposed to cut an additional 1,378, which would leave the department with 2,183, which the Democratic states argued would not be enough to fulfill the requirements Congress had written into law. “The [reduction-in-force] is so severe and extreme that it incapacitates components of the department responsible for performing functions mandated by statute, effectively nullifying those mandates,” the attorneys general wrote.
The Democratic states asked U.S. District Judge Myong Joun, a Biden appointee in Massachusetts, to issue an injunction stopping Trump. Joun complied, writing that there was “a substantial risk that, without [an injunction], there will be significant harm to the functioning of public and higher education,” which could have terrible consequences because “it is well established that an educated citizenry provides the foundation for our democracy.” The thrust of Joun’s order was that the president, the constitutional head of the executive branch, could not fire workers in the executive branch without Myong Joun’s approval.
The judge even ordered the administration to “file a status report with this court within 72 hours of the entry of this order, describing all steps the agency defendants have taken to comply with this order, and every week thereafter until the [Department of Education] is restored to the status quo prior to January 20, 2015.” The order seemed to say that if the Trump administration were to fire even a single employee at the Department of Education, it would be a violation of the law and the court’s order. The department had to remain as it was on the day Biden left the White House.
The Trump administration’s lawyers responded quickly, asking the circuit court of appeals in Massachusetts to stay Joun’s order. The court refused. The order stood. The administration had no other recourse but to go to the Supreme Court.
The president has the clear constitutional authority to do this, the administration argued before the justices. It’s what he does under our constitutional system. “The Department of Education has determined that it can carry out its statutorily mandated functions with a pared-down staff and that many discretionary functions are better left to the states,” administration lawyers wrote. “That is a quintessential decision about managing internal executive-branch functions and the federal workforce that the Constitution reserves to the executive branch alone.”
The concern, of course, was that Joun exercised power he did not have. “An injunction that supplants the executive’s policy determinations about an agency’s functions, and replaces it with a federal district court’s judgment that everything the agency does is ‘vital’ or ‘essential,’ is not business as usual,” the administration wrote.
On Monday, six Supreme Court judges — all of them except the liberal core of Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson — granted the administration’s request that Joun’s injunction be stayed. McMahon, acting on Trump’s instructions, can go forward with the layoffs.
Until now, the fight has been about Joun’s order. Now, the case itself will go on to the circuit courts, and then, probably, back to the Supreme Court, where the president’s right to run the executive branch will likely finally be upheld.
Like an earlier decision overruling a ruling by a U.S. district judge in California that would have stopped the president from firing virtually any federal worker, and like yet another decision stopping another judge’s order that the administration rehire more than 16,000 probationary workers, the Department of Education case is a lesson in what Article II means. The president has the basic constitutional authority to run the executive branch, no matter how many lawsuits the activists on the other side throw at him.