Treason trial of South Sudan’s Vice President threatens to reignite civil war

Kipchumba Ochieng

On Monday, the treason trial of First Vice President Riek Machar opened. It followed a bloody weekend in which at least 48 people were killed and more than 150 wounded in clashes between government forces and opposition fighters of Machar in the northeastern border town of Burebiey.

According to state officials, Machar’s forces from the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in-Opposition (SPLM-IO) attacked a government base but were repelled by the South Sudan People’s Defense Forces.

South Sudan's Vice-President Riek Machar seated in his office, June 30, 2012 [Photo: Hannah McNeish - VOA]

The SPLM-IO, formed after the December 2013 massacres of Nuer civilians in Juba, is the armed and political movement representing Machar’s core power base. Though formally folded into the 2018 “unity government,” the SPLM-IO continues to operate as a parallel military-political force.

Last week its leadership issued a statement calling for “regime change,” accusing President Salva Kiir of turning South Sudan into a dictatorship after Machar was dismissed and charged with treason over an alleged assault in Nasir in March that killed more than 250 soldiers. Soon after, Machar was suspended as vice president and placed under house arrest in Juba. The SPLM/IO denounced the charges as “fabricated.”

Nasir, on the Ethiopian border, is a strategic stronghold for Machar’s Nuer supporters. The Nuer, the second-largest ethnic group after the Dinka, form a significant portion of the population in Upper Nile and Jonglei. Traditionally pastoralist cattle herders, the Nuer have clashed with neighbours, particularly the Dinka, over grazing lands, conflicts deepened by colonial divide-and-rule and post-independence elites.

In 1991, Machar broke with John Garang’s Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) in Nasir, forming his own faction and plunging the movement into internecine warfare that left thousands dead, including the Bor massacre of some 2,000 Dinkas.

President Salva Kiir has relied heavily on fighters from his Dinka base, the country’s largest ethnic group. These forces formed the backbone of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and, after independence, the national army. Kiir has consistently leaned on Dinka militias and commanders to secure his rule, reinforcing ethnic divisions.

Machar’s trial has shattered the fragile 2018 peace agreement that ended five years of civil war in which 400,000 people were killed, rape was wielded as a weapon of war, famine deliberately inflicted, and more than four million displaced. It recalls the eruption of conflict in December 2013, when President Kiir dismissed Machar as vice president and sacked his entire cabinet, consolidating near-dictatorial powers under the presidency. By purging Machar and other Nuer representatives from government, Kiir transformed a political power struggle into an ethnic confrontation, unleashing massacres in Juba and driving the country into a full-scale civil war.

South Sudan emerged from the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the Sudanese government of Omar al-Bashir and the SPLM. Under US pressure, Khartoum conceded to a referendum on independence in 2011, in which 99 percent of Southerners voted to secede. Western media hailed the “birth of freedom,” with US President Obama declaring “an inspiring step forward in Africa’s long journey toward democracy and justice.”

U.S. Senior Representative on Sudan Charles R. Snyder briefs foreign press on the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in Washington, D.C., January 12, 2005 [Photo: United States Department of State]

France’s Pabloite New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) joined in. Its Africa writer Paul Martial wrote that “the new state is likely to be quickly confronted with terrible difficulties… but the newfound freedom and the dynamics of revolution in the Arab countries can change many things.”

The referendum was the product of decades of intrigue in which Washington and its allies nurtured the SPLM as a proxy force against Khartoum. As the WSWS warned in 2011, “the referendum has nothing to do with self-determination, peace or democracy. It is dictated by the efforts of the United States to gain strategic advantage in relation to China, which dominates the Sudanese oil industry.” Its aim was “the creation of a puppet state… the separation of the south will only perpetuate religious and ethnic conflict, with the most likely outcome being a resumption of warfare.”

Two years later, as the SPLM fractured and the country descended into war, the WSWS concluded, “partition has produced yet another unviable state, ruled over by warring factions beholden to one or other major power, bringing nothing but hardship to all but a tiny layer in Juba.”

Since independence, South Sudan’s elite has plundered billions. A UN investigation, Plundering a Nation, exposed how oil revenues—$25.2 billion since 2011, including $8 billion since 2018—were siphoned into patronage networks tied to Kiir and Machar. Health spending in 2024 was just $7.9 million for 12 million people, less than was allocated to the men’s national basketball team, while the Presidential Medical Unit, serving only Kiir and his circle, received more than the entire national health system. GDP has collapsed to a quarter of pre-independence levels.

The consequences have been catastrophic. South Sudan ranks second-to-last in global health coverage. One in ten children dies before the age of five, three-quarters from preventable illnesses. Maternal mortality is the world’s highest. Life expectancy has stagnated at 55 years. Two-thirds of the population face acute food insecurity, including 2.3 million acutely malnourished children and 1.2 million women. Entire regions teeter on famine.

This looting is intrinsic to the state created by imperialist partition. A rentier economy based on oil and foreign aid sustains a parasitic elite whose survival depends on plunder and armed factions.

South Sudan’s descent into civil war is part of a wider regional breakdown. To the north, Sudan’s civil war, raging for two years, has killed tens of thousands, displaced 12 million internally, and driven 4 million abroad.

In Ethiopia, the two-year war with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front ended in 2022 after hundreds of thousands of deaths and mass displacement. Armed clashes persist in Oromia and Amhara, while Egypt is whipping up tensions against Ethiopia over its Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.

Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam [Photo: Prime Minister Office Ethiopia]

In Somalia, Al Shabab continues its insurgency, while Somaliland negotiates with Ethiopia for sea access and with Washington to host Palestinians expelled from Gaza in exchange for state recognition.

To the south, Kenya has been convulsed by protests against austerity and collapsing living standards, met with murderous repression.

The catastrophe in South Sudan is the culmination of over a century of imperialist depredation, and the betrayals carried out by every faction of the national bourgeoisie. Colonial rule concentrated resources in the north around Khartoum while leaving the south in backwardness. This laid the groundwork for resentment and two ruinous civil wars.

The Khartoum elite oscillated between alliances with Washington, Moscow and Beijing, but the state remained a bulwark of capitalist rule. US military aid poured into Sudan in the 1970s to counter Soviet influence in neighbouring Ethiopia and Libya, before relations collapsed in the 1980s. When President Nimeiry imposed Islamic law in 1983, sparking the Second Civil War, Washington shifted its support to the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) and its military wing, the SPLA.

Despite employing socialist rhetoric, the SPLM was a nationalist movement led by US-trained John Garang, whose programme was limited to securing a share of Sudan’s oil wealth for a southern elite. Backed by Washington, Tel Aviv and Kampala, the SPLM was armed and financed as a proxy to weaken Khartoum and undermine Chinese influence. Israel saw the SPLM as part of its regional strategy to undermine hostile Arab states and secure access to the Red Sea.

As Beijing emerged as Sudan’s main economic partner in the 1990s and 2000s, controlling 75 percent of oil production, Washington accelerated its drive to split the country. Secession in 2011 stripped Khartoum of three-quarters of its oil reserves, leaving the new state dependent and unviable.

Stalinism facilitated these betrayals. The Sudanese Communist Party, once one of the strongest in Africa, subordinated workers and peasants to alliances with bourgeois nationalists, joining Nimeiry’s regime in 1969 only to be destroyed the following year. Across Africa, Stalinist and Maoist-backed parties tied themselves to the manoeuvres of the Soviet bureaucracy and Beijing, blocking socialist revolution in the name of a “national democratic revolution” and clearing the path for imperialist domination through corrupt local elites.

Mass protests in Brazil against amnesty for Bolsonaro’s fascist coup attempt

Guilherme Ferreira

Mass protest in Sao Paulo against amnesty legislation [Photo: Paulo Pinto/Agência Brasil]

Brazil witnessed massive nationwide demonstrations on Sunday, September 21, opposing the efforts of the political establishment to politically rehabilitate and overturn the conviction of former President Jair Bolsonaro and his military and civilian co-conspirators in the January 8, 2023 fascist coup attempt.

The protests were prompted by last week’s approval of two measures in the Brazilian House of Representatives demanded by the fascist political opposition associated with Bolsonaro as part of what they call a “National Pacification Package.”

On Wednesday, by a vote of 311 to 163, the House approved the expedited voting procedure for a bill to amnesty those who are convicted and who are under investigation for the January 8 coup attempt. On the same day, it approved a constitutional amendment bill dubbed the “PEC da Blindagem” (“Shielding Amendment”), which prohibits the criminal prosecution of members of parliament and party presidents without congressional authorization.

Mass opposition is being driven by the perception among broad sections of the Brazilian population that the corrupt bourgeois political system is striking a criminal compromise behind their backs to preserve the power of the forces exposed for conspiring to overthrow democracy and reimpose a military dictatorship. These sentiments were widely displayed in Sunday’s protests.

In the demonstrations, which took place in virtually every major city in the country, demonstrators held signs calling the president of the House of Representatives, Hugo Motta, an “enemy of the people” and chanted: “No amnesty and no forgiveness, I want to see Bolsonaro in prison.”

In São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, where the largest demonstrations occurred, more than 40,000 people took to the streets. Renowned artists had a prominent role both in the promotion of the demonstrations and giving speeches and musical performances, which was also characteristic of the historic protests against the US-backed military dictatorship (1964-1985) in Brazil.

The protest in Rio had the participation of legendary figures of Brazilian popular music, such as Chico Buarque, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, all of them imprisoned and exiled under the dictatorship and now in their eighties. As demonstrators shouted, “No Amnesty!” and “Long live democracy!” they sang the song “Cálice” (chalice, in Portuguese, which is pronounced the same as “shut up”), composed by Gil and Chico, an anthem of the struggle against the military dictatorship.

The turnout at these demonstrations exceeded the expectations of the ruling Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), the pseudo-left Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) and the unions and social movements they control, which initially called for them.

In what were considered the largest demonstrations of a left-wing character in recent years, they spontaneously attracted a crowd that far exceeded that of the September 7 Brazilian Independence Day demonstrations called by these same political forces. There, they sought to subordinate all political and social opposition to the defense of “national sovereignty” against Trump’s tariffs and for the so-called “popular agenda” of the Lula administration oriented to reversing the decline in its approval rating. The agenda included an income tax exemption for those earning up to R$5,000 per month and a reduction of working hours.

More importantly, the protests expressed widespread social, economic and political dissatisfaction, which has also fueled mass protests around the world. Recent years have also seen an increasing number of strikes, particularly by federal public workers against the Lula government’s austerity policies.

Faced with this social powder keg and unable to offer any real solutions to the problems faced by the Brazilian working class, the entire Brazilian ruling class viewed Sunday’s protests with concern. It fears that these protests will become the spark for a massive movement from below, outside the control of the nominal left and the unions it controls, that threatens the fragile bourgeois regime in Brazil, of which the PT is a fundamental pillar.

Against this threat, the PT is doing everything it can to prevent the growing discontent of the Brazilian population and the consequent explosion of protests and strikes from getting out of control. It is seeking to divert this movement behind calls for pressuring Congress to put its “popular agenda” on the table and forming a new bourgeois “broad front” for next year’s general election.

The palace negotiations within the discredited Congress last week also widely exposed the PT, which rushed to minimize the damage and prevent popular outrage from turning against the Lula government. On Thursday, the daily Estado de S. Paulo reported that Lula had advocated a “light amnesty” in a meeting with allied parties, which includes the possibility of reducing sentences for those convicted of the coup attempt in exchange for a better position to negotiate its agenda in Congress.

Equally damning, 12 PT deputies (about 20 percent of the PT’s total representation in the Chamber of Deputies) voted in favor of the “Shielding Amendment” on Wednesday. In various demonstrations across Brazil, they were denounced as alleged “traitors to the PT.”

Explaining the spurious behind-the-scenes negotiations in the Chamber, Gleide Andrade, finance secretary of the PT, stated on Thursday: “The first thing we have to do is be fair to history and to the people. The 12 who voted [in favor of the Shielding Amendment] voted because they followed instructions. And halfway through, some of them, when they saw the reaction on social media, changed their minds. Those 12 are being crucified.”

She continued: “I followed everything closely, and the national president of the PT [Edinho Silva] said so. So, yes, there was an agreement. Because of the breach of this agreement, the Chamber voted for a broad and unrestricted amnesty.”

Despite this, the PT and the pseudo-left around it saw Sunday’s protests as a “turning point” for the Lula government, advancing a clear intention to channel them into bourgeois politics. The PT president himself welcomed Sunday’s protests on X, writing that “I am on the side of the Brazilian people” and that “the National Congress must focus on measures that benefit the Brazilian people.”

Similarly, PSOL leader Guilherme Boulos said at the protest in São Paulo that “today is a historic day” because “the Brazilian left has regained its leading role in the streets.” He also demanded that the president of the Chamber put Lula’s government bills on the agenda this week.

Revealing where he wants to divert the protests, Boulos said that one of the results of the “Brazilian people taking back the streets” will be “electing Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as president of Brazil next year.” The other, according to him, is “electing the largest left-wing bloc in the Brazilian Congress. Doing the whole job, electing Lula and winning in Congress.”

With Trump’s tariffs against Brazil, the PT and PSOL are also trying to forge a bankrupt link between the “popular agendas” and the reactionary defense of nationalism. Boulos repeated that Sunday’s demonstrations were attended by “those who truly defend Brazil. We are the true patriots.” In São Paulo, the protest also featured a huge Brazilian flag, in contrast to the American flag present at the rally of Bolsonaro supporters on September 7.

The defense of nationalism, however, has nothing to do with defending the interests of the Brazilian working class, which shares common economic and political interests with the international working class, including in the United States.

With their defense of national sovereignty, the PT, PSOL and the unions they control are promoting the interests of Brazilian capitalism. Their response to the crisis is the promotion of “national unity” of the Brazilian bourgeoisie and a bankrupt “multipolar” solution to the crisis of imperialism. As the PT made clear in a document from late August:

The fight against imperialism, allied with Bolsonaro’s extreme right, fascism, and neoliberalism, must take place on two complementary fronts: through popular mobilizations, in the streets and on social media, and through the construction of broad national and international alliances, also articulated at the institutional and diplomatic levels.

Given this situation, it is imperative that we place at the center of our actions the construction of a broad alliance in defense of sovereignty and democracy, under the leadership of President Lula. In each state of Brazil, we will work to form powerful coalitions that strengthen President Lula’s reelection campaign, guarantee a majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives, and support the national development project that is already underway.

The failure of this perspective could not be clearer. At the national level, this broad front includes, as PT President Edinho Silva has already made clear, the same parties that voted en masse in favor of the Shielding Amendment and the amnesty bill. Internationally, the PT wants to strengthen relations with imperialist governments in Europe and the Democratic Party in the US, whose policies of austerity, repression, and support for genocide in Gaza have paved the way for the far right around the world.

The mass job cuts at TCS and the way forward for Indian IT workers

Yuvan Darwin

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest IT company, has initiated the biggest retrenchment in its history, eliminating around 12,000 jobs — roughly 2 percent of its global workforce. Trade union sources and media reports indicate the real number could be even higher.

These cuts come at a time when TCS is posting profits of over 120 billion rupees ($US 1.3 billion) every quarter, with profit margins near 20 percent.

On August 19, IT workers held protests outside TCS offices across India, including in Chennai, Bengaluru, Pune, and Hyderabad. While limited and organised with the support of a union with the ties to the Stalinist-led Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), the protests were significant, indicating that a section of IT workers is increasingly recognizing the need for collective action and identifying themselves as part of the working class. Long isolated behind corporate gates and branded “middle class” by the media and their employers, IT workers are entering on the path of class struggle.

Protest held in Chennai on August 19 against TRS's mass layoffs [Photo: X/UNITE]

The protests revealed a deep undercurrent of anger at TCS’s readiness to strip workers, who have often endured great hardship to acquire their skills, of their livelihoods and the IT giant’s ruthless pursuit of profit. However, the leaders of UNITE (the Union of IT and ITES Employees) ensured these actions remained token, channeling militancy into safe, symbolic demonstrations, and appeals to the pro-big business state authorities to intervene on the workers’ behalf.

The attack on IT workers is bound up with global pressures. The global IT giants such as TCS and its rivals Accenture, IBM, Amazon Web Services, and other multinationals are competing for billion-dollar contracts in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cloud services. They slash jobs to increase their profits while offering competitive bids to their global clients.

Moreover, this assault is deepened by international tensions, above all Washington’s trade war. The Trump administration, which has already hit India’s merchandise exports with punitive 50 percent tariffs, is threatening to similarly impose tariffs on services, including Indian IT services. The United States is the largest market for Indian outsourcing firms. Companies like TCS and Infosys have responded to these pressures by squeezing workers to produce greater profits through longer hours and wage suppression, and by using AI to eliminate jobs.

Far from being an Indian peculiarity, this is part of a global corporate offensive. Oracle in the United States and other giants in Europe have carried out similar mass cuts. On the other hand, the wealth of Oracle’s CEO and prominent Trump-supporter Larry Ellison rose by $100 billion in a single day earlier this month, making him the world’s richest man.

The assault on IT workers is not confined to retrenchments of existing staff. Hiring across the sector is collapsing. Recent reports show a 2–3 percent dip in overall recruitment, with the six largest IT firms, including TCS and Infosys, taking on only 3,800 employees in a recent quarter—a staggering 72 percent fall compared to the previous period.

Between July and August, tech hiring fell another 10 percent, with just 43,000 job openings nationwide, down nearly a quarter from the same time in 2024 and over 40 percent from 2022. The companies are not expanding but consolidating, backfilling only essential positions while forcing higher “utilisation rates” from remaining staff.

This hiring freeze has devastating implications for young graduates. Analysts estimate that IT firms will hire 150,000 fewer workers than projected in the second half of 2025. The promise of secure, mass white-collar employment in IT is collapsing, while companies simultaneously boast of investments in AI, machine learning, and cloud projects. The result is a brutal contradiction: tens of thousands of jobs destroyed or withheld, while demand is redirected only to narrow layers of “niche” talent.

Further blighting the prospects of Indian IT graduates is the Trump administration’s plans to restrict and impose a $100,000 fee for H-1B visas, as part of its incitement of American First chauvinism and xenophobia.

AI and automation, extraordinary advances of human knowledge, are increasingly being deployed as weapons against workers, across all industries, including the IT and IT-enabled services sectors. Algorithms are used to decide who is “useful” and who is disposable. Monitoring software records every keystroke, and tasks are fragmented into easily duplicable units in order to slash costs—in a process that has been dubbed “digital Taylorism.”

The corporate talk of “efficiency” translates into a brutal attack on IT workers. Workers are told, “Resign or we will give you bad feedback,” thereby threatening to make it still more difficult for the targeted worker to find employment elsewhere.

A common tactic is laying off experienced, better-paid workers to replace them with newer employees earning significantly smaller salaries.

After announcing the mass job cuts, TCS announced the lowest salary hikes in four years, averaging between 4.5 and 7 percent.

At the same time, CEO K. Krithivasan took home an annual pay package worth 265 million rupees or US $3.18 million, some 330 times the median salary at TRS. Such realities demonstrate the naked truth of capitalism: loyalty and decades of experience mean nothing, while executives and shareholders grow ever richer.

Infosys, another large Indian IT conglomerate, has pursued the same course. Earlier this year, it quietly dismissed hundreds of trainees. Its founder, Narayana Murthy, recently called for the imposition of a seventy-hour work week to boost “national productivity.”

In Karnataka, the Congress-led state government moved to extend working hours in Bengaluru’s tech sector, bending to corporate lobbies and openly siding with big business. Whether led by the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Congress Party, or various regional parties, India’s governments at the Centre and in the states all defend alike the profits of the IT corporations against the rights of workers.

Viral stories of workers resigning in search of “work-life balance” reveal the depth of dissatisfaction. Even the mainstream press, a mouthpiece for corporate interests, now acknowledges that many IT workers are discussing unionisation.

The isolation of IT workers is beginning to crack. The participation of some IT employees in the July 9, 2025 all-India general strike was taken in defiance of their long-standing separation and despite the lack of organizational support from the union apparatuses. It revealed both workers’ militancy and their potential to unite with other sections of the working class on an independent basis.

The Stalinist-led unions, tied to the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and Communist Party of India, play a critical role in suppressing resistance both industrially and politically. For decades, these organisations have isolated and betrayed strikes in every sector—from heavy industry to government service—while politically shackling the working class to the capitalist parties.

When in power in states like West Bengal and Kerala, the Stalinist CPM and CPI have carried out privatisations and imposed austerity. In West Bengal, as part of their self-avowed “pro-investor” policies, the CPM-led Left Front government illegalized strike by IT and ITES workers.

Nationally, in the name of fighting the far-right BJP, they support the Congress-led INDIA alliance, which offers the ruling class a right-wing alternative if the Modi government should falter. One that would be no less committed to the Indo-US military-strategic alliance and intensifying worker-exploitation through austerity, privatization, and the promotion of precarious contract-labour employment.

IT workers are increasingly realizing that they are not much different from assembly line workers in manufacturing who have long faced arbitrary firings and brutal working conditions. The problems of IT workers can only be addressed through the development of class struggle—the building of an independent industrial and political movement of the working class.

The path forward cannot rely on appeals to the bourgeois law courts or governments, regulatory reforms, or following the existing union apparatus. To wage this struggle, IT workers must organize independently, fighting for demands that directly challenge the dictatorship of capital:

*No layoffs and no forced resignations.

*An end to coercive appraisal systems and victimisation.

*The conversion of all contract jobs into permanent positions.

*The transformation of the IT giants into public enterprises under workers’ control as part of a democratically planned socialist economy directed toward fulfilling human needs, not private profit.

Supreme Court uses shadow docket to uphold Trump’s termination of Federal Trade commissioner

John Burton

The Supreme Court is seen on Capitol Hill in Washington, Dec. 17, 2024. [AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, ]

On October 6, the Supreme Court will begin its 2025 term with routine oral arguments in a case turning on whether a Texas trial judge violated the Constitution by prohibiting a criminal defendant from conferring with counsel during a recess in trial testimony. More than 30 other oral arguments will take place before the December recess, mixing relatively mundane procedural, regulatory and taxation issues with so-called “hot button” items, such as the death penalty, voting rights, religion, campaign finance and transgender athletes.

Based on historical averages, roughly 40 or 50 more cases will be accepted, briefed, argued and decided before the current Supreme Court term ends early next summer.

Rather than relying on this traditional “merits docket,” however, the Supreme Court’s six-justice extreme right-wing majority now rules increasingly through “emergency orders” on the “shadow docket,” almost always aligning with the fascistic Republican Party and expanding the executive power wielded by President Donald Trump.

Continuing this trend, on Monday, September 22, the majority filed a summary order that effectively ends the case brought by Federal Trade Commission (FTC) member Rebecca Slaughter challenging her termination by Trump.

Congress established the FTC in 1914 to regulate domestic commerce and protect against monopoly. To give it at least some political independence, the enabling statute limits the removal of commissioners to cases of “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office,” a typical “good cause” provision.

The Supreme Court decided 90 years ago in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States that Congress can create agencies such as the FTC and insulate their members from presidential removal unless good cause for firing exists. This principle, important to the checks and balances underlying the overall constitutional framework, has come under recent attack from right-wing Supreme Court justices, who advocate a so-called “unitary executive.”

On March 18, Trump sent terse emails terminating Slaughter and another FTC commissioner, Alvaro Bedoya, prompting Slaughter to write that Trump violated “the plain language of a statute and clear Supreme Court Precedent … because I have a voice, and he is afraid of what I’ll tell the American people.” Bedoya, who is no longer challenging Trump’s action, added, “The President wants the FTC to be a lap dog for his golfing buddies.”

Ironically, Slaughter was originally nominated by Trump in 2018 to serve as one of the FTC’s seven commissioners. In 2023, Joe Biden renominated her to a second term, which was scheduled to end in 2029.

Citing the statutory language and Humphrey’s executor, last July, Washington D.C. District Judge Loren AliKhan ordered that Slaughter remain on the FTC while the case continues to trial in her court on whether good cause existed for her termination. AliKhan’s decision was affirmed by the D.C. Court of Appeals on September 2.

Within a week, however, Chief Justice John Roberts, an open proponent of the unitary executive, temporarily stayed the order reinstating Slaughter to her position. When the five other far-right justices joined him Monday, Slaughter’s legal position became hopeless, although the Supreme Court is going through the motions of setting her case for oral argument on the merits docket during early December to consider formally whether Humphrey’s Executor should be overruled.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote a two-paragraph dissent, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. She wrote:

Our emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars. Still more, it should not be used, as it also has been, to transfer government authority from Congress to the President, and thus to reshape the Nation’s separation of powers.

Kagan pointed out that Slaughter’s case follows those of Cathy Harris, a member of the Merit Systems Protection Board, and Gwynne Wilcox, an appointee to the National Labor Relations Board, both of whom, like the FTC commissioners, were fired for no reason by Trump despite congressional statutes restricting removal to good cause.

Both Harris and Wilcox were also reinstated by trial judges, and those orders were affirmed in the D.C. Court of Appeals. Also, both reinstatements were vacated with emergency orders from the right-wing Supreme Court majority, purportedly because “the Government faces greater risk of harm from an order allowing a removed officer to continue exercising the executive power than a wrongfully removed officer faces from being unable to perform her statutory duty.”

Mary Boyle, a Consumer Product Safety Commissioner, protected by a statute providing for removal only on good cause, also fell victim to an emergency order. This time there was a brief explanation from the majority: “The application is squarely controlled by Trump v. Wilcox.”

As noted by Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, the Supreme Court “thus treated a ruling on the shadow docket, not the 90-year-old precedent, as binding on lower courts.”

The shadow docket case being most closely watched now is that of Federal Reserve Board Governor Lisa Cook, whom Trump terminated without any due process on concocted “mortgage fraud” allegations posted to a social media account. The Supreme Court’s shadow docket decision, which could profoundly impact international perceptions of the stability of the United States economy, is expected within weeks.