The Supreme Court cast its long-telegraphed death blow to independent agencies Monday, confirming that the president can fire at-will civil servants that were meant to be insulated from political backlash. In a second opinion, though, the Court gave the Federal Reserve a special carveout from this new reality.
The odd baby-splitting in the combination of Trump v. Slaughter and Trump v. Cook — both authored by Chief Justice John Roberts — reveals the right-wing Court’s priorities: It may be sanguine about the demolition of agencies mostly used to regulate big business and protect worker rights, but is far less willing to let President Trump take over the Fed and unleash global economic chaos.
In all, the decisions represent a major triumph for the unitary executive theory pushed by the legal right for decades, as the president will now have nearly the entire executive branch under his command. The Court had been steadily marching in this direction for years, hacking away at independent agency protections in different forms. Now a major 1935 precedent protecting agency leaders, Humphrey’s Executor, has fallen.
In Slaughter, the case that overturned Humphrey’s Executor and cleared the way for the president to fire members of non-Fed independent agencies, Roberts is joined in the majority by Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, with Justice Clarence Thomas joining all but one section. Gorsuch also wrote a concurring opinion. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
In Cook, the case where the Court found the government unlikely to succeed in its attempt to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook on trumped-up mortgage fraud charges, Roberts is joined by Justices Kavanaugh, Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson. Kavanaugh and Jackson also wrote concurring opinions. Justices Thomas, Barrett and Alito all wrote separate dissents, with Justice Gorsuch joining in the last.
In his Cook concurrence, Kavanaugh hastened to point out that the Trump administration itself acknowledged the Federal Reserve’s specialness, seemingly trying to minimize the gulf between his position and that of his natural ally.
“The Government itself expressly ‘acknowledge[d]’ and did ‘not disput[e]’ that point in this case, even as the Government simultaneously (and successfully) argued that the for-cause removal protections for most independent agencies violate Article II,” he wrote.
Jackson chimed in with her concurrence to add that the Court didn’t even have to get to the merits to rule against the administration in this preliminary posture, since Trump can’t point to any real injury that would require immediate relief. Quoting herself from a prior dissent, she remarked that Trump’s inability to fire someone he wants to fire is “just another species of the far-fetched contention that the President [is] injured whenever he is prevented from doing as he wishes.”
This is a breaking news story that will be updated.
Read the rulings here:
