In a 6-3 ruling on Monday, the Supreme Court’s GOP-appointed majority backed President Donald Trump’s power to fire members of independent federal agencies and overturned a 1935 precedent that had protected agency independence.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court that removal protections for Federal Trade Commission members violate the Constitution’s separation of powers, over dissent from the court’s Democratic appointees that said the ruling “upends rather than upholds the separation of powers.”

The ruling stemmed from Trump’s attempt to fire Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, without cause. The ruling carries implications for many other agencies across the government. 

The case questioned the vitality of the 1935 Humphrey’s Executor precedent, which long protected agency independence and which the administration urged the justices to overturn. While doubting whether there had been anything left of the precedent at this point, Roberts wrote Monday, “If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, we overrule it.”

The Slaughter case also raised questions about Trump’s power to fire members of the Federal Reserve, which was at issue in a separate Supreme Court appeal this term involving Lisa Cook. While broadly backing Trump’s firing power over other agencies, the court had been strongly signaling it would grant greater protections to the central bank’s independence. 

In a separate ruling on Monday, the court rejected Trump’s emergency application to fire Cook.

Trump said he had cause to remove her, citing an unproven mortgage fraud claim. The appeal centered on how the courts should scrutinize the president’s attempt to fire her from the board before her Senate-confirmed term expires. At the heart of the dispute was the Federal Reserve Act’s provision that presidents can remove governors “for cause,” a term that isn’t defined in the law.

When he argued to the justices on Trump’s behalf, U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer conceded that the president can’t remove Cook over a policy disagreement. But he insisted that the president can remove her over the unproven fraud claim and that courts can’t even review Trump’s rationale for wanting to remove her. At the January hearing, Trump appointee Brett Kavanaugh said that if there’s no process or judicial review required, “that would weaken, if not shatter, the independence of the Federal Reserve.”

Kavanaugh and the court’s three Democratic appointees joined Roberts’ opinion in the Cook case on Monday. Roberts wrote that Congress limited the president’s power to remove Federal Reserve governors for good reason and that any change in that arrangement “must come from Congress, not the courts.”

He wrote that accepting the government’s position “would allow the President to remove a member of the Federal Reserve at any time, for any reason, without any notice before, and without any judicial check after. That would turn for-cause protection into little more than at-will employment.”

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

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