What happened
The Supreme Court yesterday allowed President Donald Trump’s removal of the last Democrat on the Federal Trade Commission and agreed to consider overturning a 90-year-old ruling limiting when a president can dismiss the members of nominally independent boards. The court’s three liberals dissented from the unsigned, unexplained emergency docket decision.
Who said what
After Trump fired the five-member FTC’s two Democratic commissioners, Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, in March, Slaughter sued while Bedoya eventually resigned. Slaughter pointed to the unanimous 1935 ruling Humphrey’s Executor, which holds that presidents can only fire commissioners for misconduct or neglect of duty. But the current court’s conservative majority has “all but overturned that precedent in recent rulings,” allowing Trump to dismiss Democratic members of two independent agencies without cause, The Washington Post said.
“Congress, as everyone agrees, prohibited each of those presidential removals,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in yesterday’s dissent. “Yet the majority, stay order by stay order, has handed full control of all those agencies to the president.” The court’s conservatives “may be raring” to overturn Humphrey’s Executor, but it still stands, she added, and the emergency docket “should never be used” to overturn precedent or, “as it also has been, to transfer government authority from Congress to the president, and thus to reshape the nation’s separation of powers.”
What next?
The Supreme Court will hear Slaughter’s case in December, signaling that a “majority of the court is ready to revisit” the “landmark” check on presidential power, said The New York Times. Slaughter, reinstated by a lower court then suspended earlier this month by Chief Justice John Roberts, will remain fired until the court issues its decision.
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