John Roberts Again Undermines SCOTUS Legitimacy With Irreconcilable Slaughter And Cook Opinions |
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John Roberts Again Undermines SCOTUS Legitimacy With Irreconcilable Slaughter And Cook Opinions
In one ruling, SCOTUS affirmed the president’s power to fire independent agency officials. On the same day, it invented a fourth branch of government to protect the Fed.
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On Monday, the Roberts Court struck a massive blow against the administrative state when, in a majority opinion drafted by the chief justice, the court affirmed in Trump v. Slaughter that “the President may remove his subordinates” within so-called independent agencies “at will.”
It should have been a given that in agencies subject to executive control and exercising executive authority by way of executive-appointed principals, the executive would be free not only to hire but to fire such principals — that “independent agencies are not ‘independent’ in the sense that they are free of the President,” as the court declared. But for more than 90 years, precedent in Humphrey’s Executor shielded the likes of the plaintiff, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, a Democrat-appointed Federal Trade Commissioner, and other leaders in the alphabet soup of multimember agencies from accountability.
Now, it seemed, the justices were putting an end to the chimera of agencies possessing a mix of powers of the three branches of government, untethered from democratic control, and unaccounted for in the Constitution.
Yet in classic Roberts Court form, it snatched partial defeat from the jaws of total victory, when on Monday it also handed down a confounding and contradictory counterpart ruling — suggesting our Constitution abides a fourth branch of government on self-evidently political grounds.
While in Slaughter the court declared that the president could remove his independent agency subordinates for any reason at all, in Trump v. Cook the majority, again led by Chief Justice Roberts, carved out an exception for the Federal Reserve.
Like other independent agencies, the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors has substantial regulatory and other executive powers. Like other independent agencies, the board consists of presidentially appointed members. And like other independent agencies, the board’s originating........