Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
“The Supreme Court on Monday morning signaled that it was likely to strike down a federal law that restricts the president’s ability to fire members of the Federal Trade Commission. During two and a half hours of argument in the case of Trump v. Slaughter, a solid majority of the justices appeared to agree with the Trump administration that a law prohibiting the president from firing FTC commissioners except in cases of ‘inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office’ violates the constitutional separation of powers between the three branches of government.” SCOTUSblog
The left worries about executive overreach and the potential for corruption.
“[Justice] Kavanaugh told [Plaintiff’s lawyer Amit] Agarwal that ‘independent agencies are not accountable to the people,’ claiming they ‘raise enormous constitutional and real-world problems for individual liberty.’ The question he skated past, of course, is why those problems are resolved when the president exerts control over these agencies. Under Trump’s thumb, is the administrative state really going to show more respect for personal freedoms?…
“He paralyzed the agencies that enforce civil service laws by unlawfully firing their leaders. And he claimed control over the Federal Communications Commission, placing it in the hands of a loyalist who sought to punish ABC after Jimmy Kimmel said something he didn’t like. The upshot is devastating: Congress gave these agencies significant power on the premise that they would exercise it with integrity. Trump is weaponizing them in service of his agenda.”
Mark Joseph Stern, Slate
“Both Netflix and Paramount want to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery… Mergers of this size trigger antitrust review. The FTC normally would assess the merger and, if satisfied that it would not create an anticompetitive environment, provide regulatory sign-off…
“The opportunity for corruption here is intolerably high. The FTC, stacked with Trump loyalists, could kill the Netflix deal and steer it toward Paramount, where Trump’s son-in-law stands to benefit immensely. That would, as it happens, also put CNN in the hands of Trump-friendly owners, meaning another big step toward control of our news by the billionaire class.”
Jay Kuo, The Big Picture
“The goal [of independent agencies] is to create expertise and independence, so that some of the government’s work is insulated from the abusive pull of political decision-making… [But] the entire oral argument was infused with contempt for Congress’ authority and democratic legitimacy. The Republican-appointees prefer to give the president unlimited power than to allow Congress to create the agencies it sees fit; and they see Congressional oversight not as part of its constitutional function but as a problem.”
Pema Levy, Mother Jones
“Powers that liberal-democratic revolutionaries the world over fought to take away from absolute monarchs in the 18th and 19th centuries are being reconstituted under the American executive in the 21st century. Instead of being ruled by experts answerable to Congress, we will be ruled by cronies answerable only to the president.”
Elie Mystal, The Nation
The right urges the Supreme Court to uphold the president's authority to fire agency heads.
The right urges the Supreme Court to uphold the president's authority to fire agency heads.
“Ninety years ago, a unanimous Supreme Court blessed what has become effectively a fourth branch of government: the unaccountable bureaucracy. Washington today is dotted with stone headquarters for ‘independent’ agencies, where government workers make regulations and enforce laws, insulated from voters and democracy…
“Woodrow Wilson can’t be blamed for everything, but he disliked the Founders’ constitutional vision, and the 1914 law he signed to set up the Federal Trade Commission reflected his ideas about governance by an expert class. The FTC has five commissioners serving staggered seven-year terms. While they’re nominated by the President, the law says they may be removed only for cause, such as malfeasance. Does that mean they answer to… nobody?”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“Congress can create executive-branch agencies and specify their authority, but it can’t create new branches of government unanswerable to anyone. Putting the FTC and other alphabet agencies back under presidential control doesn’t make the chief executive omnipotent; it makes the bureaucrats answerable to someone who is answerable to the voters…
“At base, Trump v. Slaughter asks whether the people we elect to govern us get to do so — or whether appointed commissioners and their staffers can run the country on autopilot. If the justices follow through on what we heard Monday, they’ll be restoring an old‑fashioned idea: In a republic, the buck should stop with the president, not assorted boards of ‘independent’ mandarins.”
Ilya Shapiro, New York Post
“Agarwal didn’t help matters by insisting that Congress could convert more cabinet-level agencies into independent commissions, taking broad civil enforcement powers out of the president’s hands. When Gorsuch asked him, ‘Does [the president] have a duty to faithfully execute all the laws?’ Agarwal replied, ‘I would say no.’…
“Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson argued that Congress could assign major questions of enforcement power to ‘nonpartisan experts working on certain issues for the good of the American people.’ It’s hard to find anyone in America who still believes in this fairy-tale vision of Washington bureaucracy. The solicitor general’s argument would ‘open the door for the president to come in, each new president, and clean house in terms of all of the individuals who are running that agency,’ Jackson complained. That’s how elections work.”
The Editors, National Review
