They might want a king, but they don't want the king to destroy global stability and the judges' own wealth with some idiotic policy like across-the-board tariffs.The Supreme Court majority all but declared Thursday that it is ready to overturn a nearly century-old precedent meant to protect independent agencies from at-will firing by the President.
It’s the last brick to fall in the division between the President and the parts of the executive branch Congress created to be beyond his reach, turning the second branch of government into an all-powerful tool to be wielded by one man.
Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the three dissenting liberals, dispensed with the usual niceties to upbraid her conservative colleagues for bending to President Trump’s whims, and doing so in a two-page ruling on the emergency docket.
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In another sign of where the majority is leaning, it mentioned, out of the blue, that the Federal Reserve, for some reason, is uniquely protected from the President’s whims due to its “unique structure” and “distinct historical tradition.”
TPM
“But then, today’s order poses a puzzle. For the Federal Reserve’s independence rests on the same constitutional and analytic foundations as that of the NLRB, MSPB, FTC, FCC, and so on — which is to say it rests largely on Humphrey’s,” Kagan wrote, citing the Court’s precedent protecting these members from at-will removal. “So the majority has to offer a different story…”
“One way of making new law on the emergency docket (the deprecation of Humphrey’s) turns out to require yet another (the creation of a bespoke Federal Reserve exception),” she added. “If the idea is to reassure the markets, a simpler — and more judicial — approach would have been to deny the President’s application for a stay on the continued authority of Humphrey’s.”
Not so independent, then.The Supreme Court vacated an appeals court’s order requiring President Donald Trump to reinstate two members of independent federal boards he fired without cause earlier this year.
Democracy Docket
If there was no cause for the firing, where is the harm in leaving them in position?The court’s 6-3 order, issued along ideological lines, upholds Trump’s dismissal of National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) member Gwynne Wilcox and Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) member Cathy Harris as lawsuits challenging their dismissals continue.
While they can proceed, the court’s order is a significant blow to the viability of their lawsuits. It also indicates that the court’s Republican-appointed majority may be leaning toward expanding Trump’s powers by overturning a 90-year-old ruling that protects independent agencies from undue presidential influence.
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“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,” the majority stated.
Is it unconstitutional, or does it just butt against SCOTUS' ruling allowing Trump to do whatever the hell he wants while he's president?Their dismissals are part of the Trump administration’s broad challenge to Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S., which has for decades allowed independent agencies to operate without direct control from the White House.
The Department of Justice has told the Supreme Court it intends to ask justices to overturn Humphrey’s Executor, arguing that laws limiting a president’s power to remove certain officials are unconstitutional.
He already does that, without having the official power.If the court ultimately overturns Humphrey’s Executor, Trump would gain extraordinary powers to investigate and penalize private businesses and individuals, tilt elections and, potentially, use monetary policy for political purposes.
America running smoothly.Before the Supreme Court’s order Wilcox and Harris had been dismissed and reinstated five times.
“One way of making new law on the emergency docket (the deprecation of Humphrey’s) turns out to require yet another (the creation of a bespoke Federal Reserve exception),” [Justice Kagan said]. “If the idea is to reassure the markets, a simpler — and more judicial — approach would have been to deny the President’s application for a stay on the continued authority of Humphrey’s.”
The majority further tipped its hand, she pointed out, by rationalizing granting Trump’s stay request by saying that it would stop the members of the two embattled agencies from being fired and rehired as the litigation proceeds. But Kagan notes that the two lower courts, as they must while Humphrey’s Executor still stands, reinstated the fired members. To allow the firings to stand, she wrote, is allowing the “President to overrule Humphrey’s by fiat.”
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She also thwacked her colleagues for their explanation of the balance of injuries, noting that the side of the agencies does not boil down to the fired members’ interest in keeping their “nifty jobs” but the interest of Congress to create agencies that the President cannot destroy.
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“I would deny the President’s application,” she added. “I would do so based on the will of Congress, this Court’s seminal decision approving independent agencies’ for-cause protections, and the ensuing 90 years of this Nation’s history.”
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Coupled with the Trump administration’s annihilation of the civil service, the executive branch will [with the eventual overturning of Humphrey's] become something much closer to a fiefdom, an extension of presidential power with few institutional guardrails. This was a guiding light of Project 2025, a plan realized in the aftermath of the first administration, when civil servants and non-toadies in the executive branch proved frustrating obstacles to Trump’s vision.
TPM
UPDATE 05/26/2025:
No modern president has ever come close to the large-scale personnel purges that we have seen under Mr. Trump, and for good reason: Many of the officials in question are protected by law from being fired at will by the president. Mr. Trump maintains that laws limiting the president’s ability to fire high-level officials are unconstitutional. In making that argument, he is drawing on a series of recent Supreme Court opinions emphasizing the importance of presidential control over subordinate officials and invalidating removal limitations at agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
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[I]n a case involving members of the National Labor Relations and Merit Systems Protection Boards, the Supreme Court quietly blessed, in an unsigned order, some or all of these firings. In doing so, the court effectively allowed the president to neutralize some of the last remaining sites of independent expertise and authority in the executive branch.
The court sought to cast its intervention as temporary, procedural and grounded in considerations of stability, with the order noting concerns about the “disruptive effect of the repeated removal and reinstatement of officers during the pendency of this litigation.”
In truth, the decision was radical. Whatever one thinks about the underlying question of presidential authority, the court should not have disposed of the case this way. It effectively overruled an important and nearly century-old precedent central to the structure of the federal government without full briefing or argument. And it did so in a thinly reasoned, unsigned, two-page order handing the president underspecified but considerable new authority.
NYT
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