A U.S. Supreme Court ruling issued Monday will end 90 years of court precedent that limits the president’s power over independent agencies.
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The conservative majority voted 6-3 to overturn a landmark 1935 ruling in the Humphrey’s Executor case that had found the president unlawfully fired a member of the Federal Trade Commission, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent that her colleagues had essentially concluded “all three branches of Government have been acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time.”
The Trump v. Slaughter case focused on the president’s March 2025 firing of Rebecca Slaughter, the last remaining Democrat on the FTC, explaining by email that keeping her as a commissioner would be “inconsistent with [the] administration’s priorities.”
The court ruled 5-4 in a separate case that Trump lacked the authority to fire Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, and legal experts puzzled over the pair of diverging outcomes – each penned by Chief Justice John Roberts.
“There’s no sugar-coating Slaughter,” sighed Georgetown law professor Steve Vladek. “It’s an enormously important ruling (far more important than the other three decisions #SCOTUS handed down today). It’s a huge win for Trump/the executive. And it’s going to have massive ramifications for the functioning of the government long after Trump is gone.”
“Welcome to the ‘Majority overrules Humphrey’s Executor’ phase of our descent into fascism,” declared civil rights lawyer Joshua Erlich. “If something has been done a certain way for a hundred years and now it’s suddenly unconstitutional, that really should require an amendment to the constitution. Otherwise what are we doing here.”
“There’s no real difference between the FTC and the FED other than Roberts likes the Fed,” opined The Nation’s Elie Mystal.
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“Slaughter is an earthquake,” warned Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern. “SCOTUS has overturned a 90-year-old precedent that facilitated much of modern governance by granting many agencies meaningful independence from the president. Now SCOTUS crushes that independence … for seemingly every agency except the Federal Reserve.”
“SCOTUS will allow Donald Trump to wreck separation of powers and the rule of law, but they draw the line at wrecking capitalism,” noted attorney Adam Bonin.
“This is the most transparently absurd set of twin decisions in Cook and Slaughter,” marveled constitutional law professor Anthony Michael Kreis.
“American democracy has just been Slaughter-ed and Cook-ed,” cracked Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch.
“It’s pretty clear they don’t want Trump messing with the fed because it has the power to destroy capital if mishandled,” stated Harvard law instructor Alejandra Caraballo. “The FTC protects consumers against corporate malfeasance so of course the commissioners can be fired. It’s so transparent whose interests are protected by this court … These decisions are filled with such swiss cheese logic and there are wildly disparate concurrences and dissents for each.”
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