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Yesterday, SCOTUSblog ran an encouraging story headlined, “Supreme Court allows Trump to remove agency heads without cause for now.” This is a much bigger deal than it looks at first blush.
In a decision that sent tremors rumbling through D.C.’s bureaucratic marble halls, the Supreme Court granted Trump’s emergency request to remove two federal agency heads— without showing cause. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) have both historically been insulated from presidential whim by statutory “for-cause” removal protections.
Those two agencies are critical to Trump’s agenda, since they review and can halt any other federal firing. Until President Trump began firing board members, the boards were majority Democrat. ...
The three liberal Justices —Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson— howled in dissent, excreting an 8-page stinker that called the majority’s two-page ruling “extraordinary.” Justice Kagan, writing for the outraged minority, said, “It favors the President over our precedent, and it does so unrestrained.” ...
When Kagan referred to “preferring the President over precedent,” she was talking about an old FDR-era (1935) Supreme Court case called Humphrey’s Executor, which was directly on point. In that case, the Supreme Court had unanimously ruled that Congress can limit the president’s power to remove officials from independent agencies. Since 2020, the conservative Court delicately chipped away at Humphrey’s holding in two Biden-era cases.
This isn’t chipping though. This is just tossing Humprey’s into the bleach-bitter. It would’ve been far easier—and far more typical—for the Court’s majority to let Humphrey’s New Deal precedent stand for now, even if they were quietly polishing the judicial garden shears for later pruning. Instead, they reached right past their precedent toward the chainsaw.
The majority’s order letting Trump proceed with the two firings seems to signal the Court is ready to overturn or at least further modify Humprey’s. If upheld, it will cut deeply into the modern administrative state, letting the president fire anyone at will, even if Congress tried to prevent the president from doing exactly that. So-called “independent agencies” include the NLRB, MSPB, FTC, FCC, the SEC, and more.
To be clear: despite all the corporate media hand-wringing, this isn’t about building up the Executive Branch’s power into a dictatorship. It might look like a shift of power from Congress to the President, but that’s a smokescreen. Instead, this decision is part of a much broader movement that is slowly shifting power from the unelected permanent bureaucracy —the deep state— and back to the President where it belongs.
The deep state appears nowhere in the Constitution, and that founding document sure doesn’t let Congress create a permanent “fourth branch” of power-wielding bureaucrats.
In other words, Presidential power isn’t expanding— it’s being restored to where it was originally placed in the Constitution: at the top of the executive pyramid. Congress’ attempt to protect federal agencies from their own boss was the original usurpation of Constitutional order. The Founders gave us three branches, not four. They vested executive power in a single person for a reason: so voters can hold someone accountable.
So— be encouraged. Despite all the attention to one frustrating immigration decision last week, the Supreme Court has not gone rogue. The brake on rogue lower courts is still working.





A 6-3 Supreme Court allows President Trump to fire Biden appointee Rebecca Slaughter from Federal Trade Commission and agrees to hear arguments in December challenging Humphrey's Executor

It prevents the president from firing his own employees in the executive branch.
https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/my-valentine-friday-february-14-2025