The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to overrule a 90-year precedent on the issue.
The Supreme Court seemed inclined to remove certain limits on President Donald Trump’s power to remove bureaucrats, but oral arguments on Dec. 8 left questions about how far their eventual decision would go in empowering the executive.
The case—Trump v. Slaughter— focused on President Donald Trump’s request to override a legislative barrier to firing members of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
Trump attempted to fire Rebecca Slaughter, an FTC commissioner, earlier this year without invoking any of the reasons Congress listed in the FTC Act as valid for removing commissioners such as her.
Slaughter then won multiple court battles in an attempt to stave off that termination.
The Dec. 8 arguments, which lasted more than two hours, could serve as a prelude to much larger changes to the nation’s separation of powers.
Besides Slaughter, other officials could be impacted if the Supreme Court takes up Trump’s invitation to overrule a 90-year precedent called Humphrey’s Executor v. United States.
In that case, a unanimous court said that if agencies exercise “quasi-legislative” or “quasi-judicial” power, their officials may receive extra protection from Congress.
U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer opened arguments by telling the court that it should overrule that decision.
Slaughter’s attorney, Amit Agarwal, accused Sauer of suggesting that the federal government has been wrong for decades in creating and blessing independent agencies like the FTC in prior decades.
While some of the justices seemed skeptical of limits that Slaughter attempted to impose on Trump’s executive authority, many of them indicated concern about overruling such a longstanding precedent.
An eventual decision might overrule Humphrey’s Executor or be more limited to Trump’s removal of Slaughter and officials in similar agencies.
Chief Justice John Roberts suggested that a prior case, Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, had hollowed out the decision in Humphrey’s Executor and indicated that Agarwal should switch to using a different precedent to support his case.
“The one thing Seila Law made pretty clear, I think, is that Humphrey’s Executor is just a dried husk of whatever people used to think it was,” Roberts said.
By Sam Dorman
