The Supreme Court has radically expanded President Donald Trump’s executive power, but its latest ruling may have inadvertently handed Democrats and progressives a powerful weapon against the GOP, legal columnist Jason Willick argued in a Sunday op-ed.
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That ruling was the court’s decision last week in Trump v. Slaughter, which significantly expanded the president’s control over independent federal agencies by allowing him to remove officials at will. The ruling overturns a landmark that prevented former President Franklin D. Roosevelt from ousting a Republican who stood in the way of his progressive New Deal economic agenda.
As such, Willick argued in an op-ed published in The Washington Post, Democrats and progressives may be well poised to enact an agenda of their choosing once they reclaim the White House.
“Independent agencies thrived in the mid-20th century, when the United States was unified enough that many government functions could be framed as apolitical. The agencies also coexisted with Democrats’ ‘neoliberal’ vision of the economy, in which technocratic regulators would manage capitalism with a (relatively) light touch,” Willick wrote.
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“Neither of those two conditions operate today. The country is sharply polarized, so Democrats and Republicans increasingly make demands of regulated companies that are incompatible. The prospect of a bipartisan, multimember body arriving at an expert consensus on a politically charged merger, or climate regulation, or a race-conscious hiring initiative, seems remote.”
As a result, federal agencies are likely to “now be even more potent partisan tools,” Willick argued, something he suspected “many on the left will come to embrace.”
“Like Roosevelt, the next Democratic president won’t have much time for legacy Republican commissioners trying to frustrate their agencies’ progressive advance,” Willick wrote.
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