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On Monday, the Supreme Court banished any doubt that it has claimed absolute authority to reshape the federal government as it sees fit. Its decisions in Trump v. Slaughter and Trump v. Cook are almost comically irreconcilable as a matter of logic: The court at once allowed the president to fire the heads of almost every independent agency while preventing him from removing a leader of the one agency it really values, the Federal Reserve. These rulings make sense only as one step in the court’s broader campaign of empowering the president—specifically this president, Donald J. Trump—to enact most of his agenda through executive action without becoming complicit in a catastrophic recession. But the biggest winner here isn’t even Trump; it’s SCOTUS itself. The court not only gets to establish sweeping new rules of American governance, but also to tweak those rules as necessary to favor presidential policies it prefers while quashing those it dislikes. Who could possibly call this a democracy?

Chief Justice John Roberts, who authored the opinions in Slaughter and Cook, handed them down as a paired set, as though one counterbalanced the other. But Slaughter is by far the more significant decision. By a 6–3 vote, the conservative supermajority overturned Humphrey’s Executor, a unanimous, 91-year-old precedent that limited the White House’s ability to interfere with independent agencies. Humphrey’s held Congress could prevent the president from firing the heads of these agencies without good cause, affirming a tradition that reached back to the early days of the republic. Since then, Congress has created dozens of agencies whose leaders could not be terminated at the White House’s whim. In Slaughter, Roberts........

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