Supreme Court backs Trump’s bid to fire independent federal agency members
In a 6-3 ruling on Monday, the Supreme Court’s GOP-appointed majority backed President Donald Trump’s power to fire members of independent federal agencies and overturned a 1935 precedent that had protected agency independence.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court that removal protections for Federal Trade Commission members violate the Constitution’s separation of powers, over dissent from the court’s Democratic appointees that said the ruling “upends rather than upholds the separation of powers.”
The ruling stemmed from Trump’s attempt to fire Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, without cause. The ruling carries implications for many other agencies across the government.
The case questioned the vitality of the 1935 Humphrey’s Executor precedent, which long protected agency independence and which the administration urged the justices to overturn. While doubting whether there had been anything left of the precedent at this point, Roberts wrote Monday, “If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, we overrule it.”
The Slaughter case also raised questions about Trump’s power to fire members of the Federal Reserve, which was at issue in a separate Supreme Court appeal this term involving Lisa Cook. While broadly backing Trump’s firing power over other agencies, the court had been strongly signaling it would grant greater protections to the central bank’s independence.
In a separate ruling on Monday, the court rejected Trump’s emergency application to fire Cook.
Recommended
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
Latest Post
