The Supreme Court on Monday backed President Donald Trump’s power to fire members of independent federal agencies and overturned a 1935 precedent that had protected agency independence. At the same time, in a separate case, the court stopped Trump from immediately firing Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.
In the first case, Trump v. Slaughter, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court’s GOP-appointed majority 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.”
Slaughter told MS NOW’s Alicia Menendez after the ruling that she was “very worried about a future where presidents like President Trump can wield this enormous grant of executive power” that the court “just handed to him in order to reward his friends and punish his enemies, and do so with impunity.”
The Slaughter case also raised questions about Trump’s power to fire members of the Federal Reserve, which was at issue in Cook’s separate case. While broadly backing Trump’s firing power over other agencies, the GOP-appointed majority had been strongly signaling ahead of Monday that it would grant greater protections to the central bank’s independence, even as the court’s Democratic appointees had criticized the majority’s reasoning behind singling out the Federal Reserve for saving.
As expected in the 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.”
Yet Roberts was careful to clarify that the “ultimate question” of whether Trump can remove Cook for cause depends partly on the underlying facts, which the court didn’t address on Monday because those facts “have yet to be found or analyzed under the relevant legal standards.”
Allison Detzel contributed reporting.
The post Supreme Court backs Trump’s bid to fire independent federal agency members appeared first on MS NOW.
Leave a Reply