The Supreme Court is about to give Trump its most coveted crown jewel

Rarely does a blockbuster case come before the Supreme Court that would radically alter the balance of power between the president and Congress and whose outcome is already well known. But that is the case in Trump v. Slaughter, which the court will hear on Monday, where President Donald Trump is asking the court to expand his autocratic push by giving him the power to fire independent agency officials at will.

The case arises from Trump’s massive purges of Democratic appointees from independent agencies across the executive branch. These officials are technically protected from removal unless “for cause” under the laws Congress passed to create the agencies, under a precedent known as Humphrey Executioner. These for-cause removal protections, intended to preserve the independence of these “quasi-judicial” and “quasi-legislative” agencies from the whims of the president, were upheld by the Supreme Court in a 1935 case from which the precedent takes its name.

The case now centers on one of those fired officials, Rebecca Slaughter, a member of the Federal Trade Commission. She sued the Trump administration claiming that, under Humphrey’s Enforcer, she could not be fired unless there was good cause and that she should be reinstated to her position at the FTC. The lower courts agreed. But Trump appealed to the Supreme Court, where the court’s six conservative justices sided with the president for the short term, allowing Slaughter to be removed from office while they heard the case.

It was, in effect, a sign that Humphrey’s Executor would be overthrown, ending all independent agencies across the executive branch and handing Trump even more of the autocratic power he has already begun to wield.

Without removal-for-cause protections, a president could fire officials if they don’t enact the policies he wants. It would affect a variety of agencies that traditionally have the power to work on their own without presidential input: the FTC, the Federal Reserve Board System, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Election Commission, the National Transportation Safety Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would be at risk.

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While these agencies may seem like alphabet soup, the potential impact for Americans is enormous. Relaxing protections for officials at these agencies means the president could force these agencies to launch investigations, impose fines, approve mergers or sales, grant or withdraw broadcast licenses, and, most controversially, set economy-wide interest rates. Agencies that are meant to do things like monitor the economy, regulate nuclear energy, and even maintain transportation safety regulations would suddenly be more beholden to the president’s wishes than to the needs of the public.

It is the pinnacle of Trump’s attempt to consolidate even more power, this time truly at the expense of the American people.

Overthrowing Humphrey’s Executor is the crown jewel for proponents of the legal argument known as unitary executive theory. This theory, rooted in a fraudulent originalist interpretation of the Constitution, holds that the president has exclusive control of the entire executive branch and that neither Congress nor the judiciary can limit how he uses the powers granted to him by the Constitution to direct any entity within the executive branch.

The argument in favor of this theory, put forward by the Trump administration in the Slaughter case, is that the Constitution vests “executive power… in a president” who must “see that the laws are faithfully executed.” If the president is to execute the laws, then he must have complete power over the entire executive branch. Or so the theory goes.

This was most explicitly endorsed by the Supreme Court in two recent cases: Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2020, which stripped the CFPB director of removal-for-cause protections, and Trump v. United States in 2024, which placed the president above the law by granting him immunity from criminal prosecution for most official acts.

“According to our Constitution, the ‘Executive Power’—all of it—is ‘conferred upon a President,’ who must ‘see that the Laws are faithfully executed,’” stated the majority decision in the Seila Law. He added: “Without that power, the president could not be held fully accountable for carrying out his own responsibilities.”

In Trump v. US, which addressed whether presidents had immunity from criminal prosecution, a key point of the debate was whether Trump could be prosecuted for trying to purge the Justice Department and install a crony willing to help him steal the 2020 election. The decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, ruled that he could not do so because the president’s “exclusive power of removal in executive agencies” is one of his “conclusive and preclusive” powers that cannot be regulated by Congress nor judged by the courts.

These decisions build directly on what the court’s conservatives will do in Slaughter: gut the independent agencies that Congress created and eliminate their ability to block presidential agendas.

Susan Walsh via News

The theory of the unitary executive was invented by the conservative legal movement for this very purpose. It dates back to the challenges that Republican Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had in trying to undermine the purposes of regulatory agencies created by Congress, which had been completely controlled by Democrats from 1957 to 1981.

In Nixon’s second term, he sought to wrest control of an administrative state created by liberal Democrats to divert it from its purpose. His overreach and eventual downfall in the Watergate scandal led Congress to fight back and further restrict the presidency.

Conservatives saw these efforts to rein in the president as actions of an Imperial Congress. They also increasingly saw the administrative state as a tool for liberal priorities such as environmental regulation, civil rights enforcement, and consumer and worker safety. Public officials working to achieve the liberal goals of these congressionally created agencies could undermine the goals of a conservative president, such as Reagan. The only way to counter this was an all-powerful president. And so conservatives in the Reagan administration invented the theory of the unitary executive.

“We were strong proponents of the theory of the unitary executive, according to which all federal executive power is vested by the Constitution in the president,” Justice Samuel Alito, who served in Reagan’s Office of Legal Counsel, said at an event for the conservative Federalist Society in 2000. “And I thought then, and I still think, that this theory best captures the meaning of the text and structure of the Constitution.”

The first real test of the theory failed in 1988, when the Supreme Court rejected Reagan’s attempt to invalidate the independent counsel statute created after Watergate in Morrison v. Olson. But then-Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent, which asserted that the independent counsel statute infringed on a “purely executive power,” became scripture for the Unitarians who now dominate the conservative legal movement and the Supreme Court.

Despite claims to an interpretation of the original meaning of the Constitution, the theory of the unitary executive, particularly as it appears in the Slaughter case, is not based on a factual interpretation of history. In seeking to overturn the precedent in Humphrey’s Executioner, Unitarians, as in Scalia’s Morrison dissent, claim that the decision’s statement that Congress can make “quasi-judicial” and “quasi-legislative” agencies independent through just-cause removal protections is erroneous. As a brief filed in the Slaughter case by a group of historians shows, that in itself is incorrect.

“These criticisms are contradicted by the historical record. As Humphrey’s Executor noted, the concept that some offices have hybrid functions that can justify restrictions on impeachment power dates back to James Madison,” the report by historians Noah Rosenblum and Nathaniel Donahue states.

The brief dates back to the creation of the Comptroller of the Treasury during the First Congress in 1789, which Madison declared was not “purely of an executive character” and took actions “of judicial quality.” Congress could therefore restrict the president’s direct influence over the agency.

“[T]“There may be strong reasons why such an official should not hold office at the pleasure of the executive branch of the government,” Madison wrote.

Patrick Semansky via News

Furthermore, the Supreme Court repeatedly referred to such agencies as “quasi-judicial” or “quasi-legislative” when the administrative state was created and sustained by the courts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

And while Unitarians continue to claim that “quasi-judicial” and “quasi-legislative” agencies are a fiction in the face of the historical record, they also undermine their own argument by inventing exceptions that have nothing to do with legal theory.

This has become clearer in the big question hanging over the end of removal-for-cause protections: What to do about the Federal Reserve? No other agency has as much power over the entire country as the Federal Reserve, through its power to set monetary policy through interest rates. Control by a president, rather than a committee of economic experts, is widely seen as dangerous to markets not only in the United States but throughout the world. When the court addressed this question in a similar case brought by a member of the National Labor Relations Board fired by Trump, it created its own entirely new reasoning to prevent the president from gaining the power to take full control of the Federal Reserve and set interest rates for the entire economy.

“The Federal Reserve is a quasi-private entity with a unique structure that follows the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States,” according to the decision. majority of the court’s conservatives in Trump vs. Wilcox that stayed a lower court order.

Dissenting, Justice Elena Kagan criticized this “unexpected” claim by conservatives as lacking legal basis. “[T]The independence of the Federal Reserve is based on the same constitutional and analytical foundations as that of the Federal Reserve. [other independent agencies] – that is, it is based largely on Humphrey’s theory. [Executor]”Kagan writes.

Regardless of how conservatives on the court choose to contort themselves to protect the Fed while killing independent agencies, this will not be the end of this issue. The court hears the Case of Federal Reserve Board Governor Lisa Cookwho was allegedly fired by Trump based on trumped-up charges of mortgage fraud, in January.

However, the final outcome in Slaughter’s case is known. The court will eliminate independent agencies. In doing so, he will have – once again – given Trump unprecedented autocratic power to enforce his will throughout the government. The consequences of this monumental decision can already be seen in Trump’s rise. an increasingly authoritarian administration.