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Yesterday, social and corporate media were all atwitter discussing the latest Supreme Court arguments in a case named, appropriately enough, Trump v. Slaughter. The New York Times ran its story below the headline, “Justices Seem Ready to Give Trump More Power to Fire Independent Government Officials.” The sub-headline added, “A ruling in the president’s favor … would be a major expansion of presidential authority.”

To courtwatchers, it appears that SCOTUS is stretching and doing its warmup exercises and otherwise getting ready to clobber one of the legs of the Swamp’s stool. But it’s not obvious to regular folks why firing a lackwitted FTC commissioner that nobody ever heard of is a big deal. So let’s unpack.

In 2018, during Trump 1.0, the President appointed Democrat Rebecca Slaughter, pictured above, to the Federal Trade Commission’s five-member board. (By law, no more than three Commissioners can be from the same political party, which explains why he had to pick a Dem.) This year, 2025, when Trump got back, Ms. Slaughter received a tart email saying her services were no longer required.

Slaughter’s electronic pink slip gave no explanation, other than that her continued employment “was inconsistent with the President’s priorities.” This ran afoul of the FTC’s so-called “independence,” under which the President may only remove an FTC Commissioner for cause— and not just for policy disagreements.

Trump’s lawyers knew that, but they fired Slaughter without cause anyway, and then said it was about policy, practically daring her to sue them.

She took the bait and sued. The DC Circuit ordered Trump to reinstate Slaughter, unslaughtering her, so to speak, but SCOTUS overruled it, letting her termination stand. The case continued. Oral arguments occurred yesterday, with Washington’s elites on pins and needles waiting to see how the Supremes would come down. ...

Current law shields the heads of certain key regulatory agencies from removal by the President, even though the President appoints them to those posts and their agencies operate within the Executive Branch. An ancient (1935) FDR-era case with the colorful name Humphrey’s Executor, the Supreme Court found the job shield was constitutional, and that’s been the state of affairs ever since.

In short, agency heads like the FTC’s commissioners have no boss. You could call them “little kings” if you want. They rule tiny but important territories of regulatory resistance and are thorns in the sides of incoming administrations. Because commissioners and board members have staggered terms, and can’t be fired without cause, presidents are stuck with them until an opening appears, which could be years into a presidential term.

President Trump rejected that status quo. His lawyers think Humphrey’s Executor was a bad decision, like Roe v. Wade, and that it helped create the modern administrative bureaucracy, which we often call the (lower-case) deep state. And it appears the Court is ready to agree. The Times said, “the court’s conservative majority seemed ready to overturn or strictly limit the landmark 1935 decision.”

For instance, Chief Justice Roberts called Humphrey’s “just a dried husk of whatever people used to think it was.” As our friends from South of the Border would say, that probably means no mas.

Nobody explained the problem posed by independent commissioners better than the Court’s most intellectually unique member, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Five, who set a new Guinness record by using the word “expert” (or a synonym) 37 times in a single sentence. ...

Specifically, in a near-Guinness level run-on sentence, Justice Jackson rhetorically moonwalked through the looney liberal notion that unelected technocrats are somehow smarter and more trustworthy than dumb politicians (or judges, for that matter) who are actually accountable to voters:

JACKSON: “Some issues, some matters, some areas, should be handled in this way by non-partisan experts, that Congress is saying that expertise matters with respect to aspects of the economy and transportation and the various independent agencies that we have, so having a president come in and fire all the scientists and the doctors and the economists and the Ph.D.s and replacing them with loyalists and people who don’t know anything is actually not in the best interest of the citizens of the United States, these issues should not be in presidential control.”
Anyone who’s read more than one C&C post knows how I feel about “experts.” Especially “experts” as Democrats loosely define that term, meaning people who believe men can get pregnant and who call castration “medical care.” (I volunteer to pay for their ‘medical care.’)

Ironically, the subject of this lawsuit, Ms. Slaughter, is neither a “scientist” nor a “doctor” nor a “PhD.” Nor is she “non-partisan.” She’s a politically connected Harvard lawyer who worked for Senator Chuck Schumer and was first appointed to the FTC at age 36 without accomplishing anything but termiting her way into bureaucracy.

So it wasn’t completely clear that Justice Brown even knew what case she was blathering about.

Jackson’s cerebrally suspect reasoning spurred a rare rebuke from Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who snapped:

KAVANAUGH: “Independent agencies are not accountable to the people. They’re not elected as Congress and the President are, and are exercising massive power over individual liberty and billion-dollar industries. Once the power is taken away from the president, it’s very hard to get it back in the legislative process. I think broad delegations to unaccountable independent agencies raise enormous constitutional and real-world problems for individual liberty.”

Last year, in the unrelated Loper Bright case, SCOTUS ended the so-called “Chevron Doctrine,” another anti-democratic, bureaucracy-protecting, liberal court innovation from the 1980’s, which required courts to defer to the decisions of “doctors and economists and PhD’s” in administrative agencies like the EPA, which immediately began declaring federal wetlands protection over dewy moist areas in people’s front yards and licensing how much carbon dioxide middle schoolers were allowed to emit after their burrito lunch.

But the Court ended Chevron, which knocked one leg out from under the deep state’s stool. If they similarly reverse or restrict Humphrey’s Executor, that would wipe out another leg, and the stool will probably topple over, along with all the morbidly obese bureaucrats squatting on it.

Together, Humphrey’s and the now-defunct Chevron Doctrine formed a protective duo: Humphrey’s shields agency bureaucrats, and Chevron shielded the substance of their actions. One analyst noted that this duo “paved the way for the modern administrative state” by limiting presidential (Humphrey’s) and judicial (Chevron) meddling in agency activities.

You know how people always complain that, “you can elect Democrats or Republicans, but nothing ever changes?” This is why.

Assuming the Supreme Court expands the president’s power to rein in the agencies and fire the people who work for him, elections will suddenly become much more meaningful. Things will start changing, fast. That sounds good now— but what about the long-term risks? Agency independence cuts both ways. When Democrats get back into power, will the seesaw slam back the other way and knock us silly?

That potential peril brings us to the gist, or nub, of the problem. The only reason an unrestrained president is so powerful —why Democrats keep calling Trump a “king”— is because Congress keeps delegating its lawmaking powers to Executive agencies. For example, during the pandemic, HHS (an executive agency) was empowered by laws that Congress passed to declare on its own: (1) whether an emergency existed and for how long, (2) which people and products got legal liability immunity, and (3) who could be coerced into taking the shots.

Those pandemic policies should never have been delegated to unelected bureaucrats. They should have been debated by lawmakers, in public, and voted on, so we would know who should be hounded out of office in disgrace. ..

In short, the wheel of bureaucratic tyranny first began spinning when the lazy Congress started delegating its lawmaking authority to executive agencies, calling it “rulemaking”. That, in turn, threatened to make the president too powerful, so court cases like Humphry’s were needed to constrain runaway presidential power.

The real answer —and this is where the conservative Court has been headed ever since Trump 1.0— is to start forcing Congress to make its own laws, and to stop delegating the details to the Executive Branch.

Eliminate all regulations so that we have only laws enacted by elected representatives of the people, and never any regulations and rules created by unelected bureaucrats.