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The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday to allow President Donald Trump to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) without citing due cause, upending decades of precedent that restricted presidents from removing political appointees from independent commission boards.
Commissioners of the FTC Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, both of whom were appointed by Democrats, were fired by Trump early in his second presidential term. Trump did not identify a reason for doing so, stating only that their “continued service on the FTC [was] inconsistent with [his] Administration’s priorities.”
Slaughter sued, arguing her removal violated the Administrative Procedure Act, and that it went against a 1935 Supreme Court ruling called Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. That decision found that presidents are limited from removing political appointees to independent commissions without just cause.
, the conservative-controlled Supreme Court sided with Trump, overturning Humphrey’s findings and ruling that presidents could indeed fire independent commissioners without giving proper reason, even those laid out as necessary by Congress in the establishment of those commissions.
Chief Justice John Roberts authored the majority opinion in the ruling, stating that the previous provisions “deviate” from the “model of Presidential supervision” that is supposed to occur under the Constitution.
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Our Constitution creates three branches, but only one President. That President is not all powerful — not by any means. But he is not impotent either. He and he alone is vested with ‘[t]he executive Power’ of the United States.
“Subordinates who exercise the President’s power are subject to removal by him,” Roberts wrote.
, Justice Sonia Sotomayor disagreed with the chief justice’s reasoning, arguing that the ruling upended not only the precedent in Humphrey’s, but the constitutional process altogether.
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“For most of this Nation’s history, Congress and the President together have decided that some Government functions should operate at a distance from partisan politics. … Congress has created agencies that in various ways have embodied this goal of independence,” Sotomayor recognized.
“Today, this Court undoes centuries of political practice and concludes that all three branches of Government have been acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time. Its conclusion is wrong,” Sotomayor wrote.
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The text of the Constitution, along with its history, the longstanding practices of the political branches, and the precedents of this Court, make clear that Congress may limit the causes for which the heads of Commissions like the FTC can be removed by the President. In holding otherwise, the Court gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.
The ruling from the court “promises to unleash only chaos,” Sotomayor said.
Trump called the ruling a “BIG WIN” for his administration and for future presidents.
“It is such an Honor to be the sitting President who won this Historic and Unprecedented Ruling, one of the most important ever given with respect to Presidential Powers,” he wrote on Truth Social.
With the ruling, the Supreme Court has potentially unleashed the ability for Trump to reshape the makeup of dozens of federal agencies, including many that have been traditionally viewed as meant to operate independently of the president. Those agencies include the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Communications Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Election Commission, and more.
“As Justice Sotomayor recognized in dissent, today’s decision abandons nearly a century of settled constitutional understanding and replaces it with a loyalty test,” Gary DiBianco, co-founder of Lawyers for Good Government, said in reaction to the ruling.
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