The outcome in Trump v. Slaughter, which the Supreme Court will hear on Monday, December 8, could not be more preordained. Slaughter involves a struggle over presidential power that has animated many prominent Republican lawyers and judges since the 1980s. And this peculiar faction of right-wing lawyers and judges now controls the Court itself.

Key takeaways

• One of the Roberts Court’s major projects is reworking how power is distributed among the three branches of government.
  
• This project includes presidential immunity from many prosecutions, full presidential control over nearly all federal agencies, and a judicial veto over the executive branch.
  
• The Court’s upcoming decision in Trump v. Slaughter will almost certainly cement President Trump’s control over federal agencies.
  
• The biggest loser in this rethinking of America’s separation of powers is Congress.

Slaughter is one of the most significant milestones in the Republican justices’ project to remake America’s separation of powers. In Slaughter, the Court is expected to strip Congress of most of its power to create “independent” federal agencies that have some freedom to act in ways that the president may not like. Trump’s arguments in Slaughter closely track the Republican justices’ arguments in Trump v. United States (2024), the decision permitting the president to commit crimes.

Meanwhile, an earlier, separate line of cases, that the Court’s Republican majority also championed, shifted power away from the executive branch and toward the judiciary, permitting the Supreme Court to veto federal policies created by the executive if a majority of the justices believe those policies are too ambitious. These cases often involve a newly created legal doctrine known as “major questions.”

The Court, in other words, is engaged in a wholesale rethinking of the separation of powers. Some parts of this project seek to transfer power away from Congress and to the president. Other parts seek to transfer power from Congress and the president to the judiciary. And none of this project has more than the most tenuous grounding in the Constitution’s text.

The precise issue before the Court in Slaughter is whether President Donald Trump may fire Rebecca Slaughter, one of five commissioners on the Federal Trade Commission. By law, members of the FTC may only be removed “for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” But Trump does not claim that Slaughter was neglectful or malfeasant. Instead, he believes her views are “inconsistent with my Administration’s priorities.”

If you’re holding out hope that Slaughter might prevail, don’t. The Republican justices already ruled last September that Trump could, in fact, fire her (although that September order was technically temporary). While the Court is now going through the motions of reading briefs and holding an oral argument before it issues its final ruling against Slaughter, it is unlikely that the outcome in this case will change.

The case turns on something known as the “unitary executive,” a legal theory that had minimal support on the Supreme Court a generation ago. One of the ur-texts laying out this theory is Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent in Morrison v. Olson (1988), a dissent that no other justice joined — but that all six of the current Court’s Republicans now view as gospel.

Scalia’s Morrison dissent focused on a provision of the Constitution stating that “the

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