Hillary Clinton warned that the Supreme Court’s Republican majority is “turning the clock back” with some of its recent decisions, including the “nonsensical” ruling earlier this week that gives the president the authority to fire members of independent federal agencies.

The former secretary of state pointed to the “mental gymnastics” that the high court performed when it backed President Donald Trump in his case against Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, whom he fired without cause. The ruling on Monday overturned a 1935 precedent that had protected agency independence. 

“I mean, it is a nonsensical — and it’s almost embarrassing to read, because they know it’s nonsensical, but they don’t care,” Clinton said during an interview published Thursday with Marc Elias, the founder of the progressive platform Democracy Docket.

She suggested that the court’s separate ruling that day allowing fired Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook to keep her job for now made the Slaughter decision even less coherent.

“What we’ve got is a full court attack on fundamental principles of constitutional law, judicial precedent, of long-standing norms and interpretation, and it truly is turning the clock back,” Clinton added.

Her cutting declaration followed Tuesday’s final day of Supreme Court decisions for cases argued this term.

Clinton called on Democrats to “play the long game” like conservatives have when it comes to the high court. She pointed to the power harnessed by the Federalist Society, a national coalition of conservative lawyers and law students that seeks to install right-leaning legal minds in presidential administrations and across the judiciary. Six of the nine current Supreme Court justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts, who authored the landmark 2024 presidential immunity decision in Trump v. United States, are current or former members of the society.

According to Clinton, Democrats might just learn something from it.

“My fear, and I’ve said this to a lot of people, is, you know, we don’t, as I mentioned earlier, play the long game, and we don’t play it in a coherent, unified way,” Clinton said. “Let’s get together. There are certain fundamental decisions that have to be made. Democracy is core to that.”

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