June 29, 2026
“To show the importance of the Slaughter Case, 90 years of precedent has been COMPLETELY AND UNEQUIVOCALLY OVERRULED, greatly increasing Presidential Power at a time when it is most needed!” President Donald J. Trump wrote this afternoon. He continued: “Today’s Historic Slaughter Decision by the Supreme Court is the Greatest Increase in Presidential Power in the last 100 years. Such a Monumental Ruling at such an important time!”
Political theorist Jacob T. Levy posted in response: “No, see, ‘overruled 90 years of precedent in order to expand presidential power’ is the way *critics* describe it. *Your* side says: resisting intrusion into core executive functions, protecting the sanctity of the separation of powers, and acknowledging that the precedent has been whittled away.”
But Greg Sargent of The New Republic countered that “Trump constantly and explicitly holds up his naked corruption *as a badge of honor* that his supporters are supposed to thrill to (and see benefit for themselves in). He thinks corruption is the highest form of winning.”
The case of Slaughter v. Trump began in March 2025, when Trump fired the last remaining Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, Rebecca Slaughter. Since 1935 the Supreme Court has said the president does not have the power to fire members of independent agencies created by Congress except for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
Although Trump himself initially appointed Slaughter, he claimed he fired her because her continued service on the independent commission was “inconsistent with [the] Administration’s priorities” and that he had the right to do so under the authority granted to him by Article II of the Constitution despite the fact Congress set up the position in such a way that it would be shielded from presidential politics.
This argument is an attempt to establish the idea of the “unitary executive,” a theory the right wing has pushed since the 1980s, when it began to distrust the will of voters as they expressed it through Congress and thus tried to find ways to assert the power of the president and reduce the power of Congress.
The theory of the unitary executive says that since the president is the head of one of the three independent branches of government—those are the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the judicial branch—he has sole authority over the executive branch and cannot be reined in by the other two branches. Trump has leaned into this idea since 2019, when he told attendees at the Turning Point USA Teen Student Action Summit being held in Washington, D.C., “I have an Article II, where I have…the right to do whatever I want as president.”
The Supreme Court’s 2024 Donald J. Trump v. United States decision supported Trump’s reading of the powers of the president when it took the radical position that a president could not be prosecuted for crimes committed in the course of official presidential duties. In his second term, Trump has worked to fit his power grabs within the contours of that decision. Now the Supreme Court appears primed to hand him another win by finding the president has complete control over the officers in the executive branch, including the independent agencies established by Congress but which Congress has been placing in the executive branch since the administration of President George Washington.
Representing the government, Solicitor General John Sauer told the court that the president must be able to remove officials in the agencies because “the President must have the power to control and…the one who has the power to remove is the one who…is the person that they have to fear and obey.”
In hearings on the case last December, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson suggested that this political destruction of the independent agencies Congress had established to provide nonpartisan expertise on issues like how to regulate pollutants would hurt the country. “[H]aving a president come in and fire all the scientists, and the doctors, and the economists and the PhDs, 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,” she said.
Today, in a 6–3 vote, the Supreme Court decided the case in Trump’s favor. Now, even if the American people elect members of Congress who create agencies to protect our interests, the president can gut them and turn them to his own purposes.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. They noted that throughout our history, both Congress and the president have agreed that some of government’s functions should operate outside of party politics. Financial management, workplace safety, consumer safety, addressing environmental hazards, and managing nuclear energy, for example, should not depend “on who is in office—much less on who is disfavored or owed a favor by those in office—but also on judgment, expertise, and the public good.”
“Since the founding, Congress has created agencies that in various ways have embodied this goal of independence. Over the last 140 years especially, the political branches have done so by establishing agencies like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC): bipartisan, multimember bodies with “for-cause” removal protections. This structure allows the agencies to address complex problems while enjoying some independence from Presidential removal and thus absolute partisan control.”
“Today,” though, they write, “this Court undoes centuries of political practice and concludes that all three branches of Government have been acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time. Its conclusion is wrong…. [T]he Court gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once-coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.”
Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) explains: “The FTC, or the Federal Trade Commission, is an independent government agency that is supposed to protect you, the American consumer. They fight fraud, ensure businesses are making accurate claims in their advertising, and enforce data privacy and security. The independence of the agency ensures that the FTC doesn’t make decisions at a whim of any one president or political party, but instead acts in your best interest. For example, the FTC put more money back into the pockets of Americans by banning junk fees for short-term lodging and live event activity.”
Kim notes that we’ve seen Trump “target, fire, prosecute civil servants, perceived as political enemies. We’ve seen him install members of his inner circle, including his own family, campaign donors, and people with personal loyalties to him. And we’ve seen him attack federal agencies and federal employees, gutting critical programs and firing the people who run them.”
With the Supreme Court’s decision, Trump now has “unchecked power to remove any head of any independent agency. Get the agencies to bend to his will, to play by his rules.”
As legal analyst Barb McQuade notes, Trump’s new powers will let him fire commissioners at agencies including the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Product Safety Board, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Nuclear Safety Board. Federal employees have been free from political interference for 150 years, but now, she writes,“The spoils system is back, baby!”
The court’s decision in Trump v. Slaughter gives Trump power he clearly has no inclination to give up. When asked today if he would sign the popular bipartisan housing bill that passed Congress with overwhelming support, Trump said he hadn’t decided and called the bill “a yawn.” He wants Congress to pass the voter ID law that will essentially guarantee that voters cannot turn Republicans out of office, making the United States a one-party state in which Congress simply rubber-stamps the actions of the president. It appears he is willing to hold the housing bill hostage until he gets it.
“To me,” he said, “compared to the Save America Act, just about everything is a big yawn.”
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Notes:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3e073pglvzo
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-332_qn12.pdf
https://www.c-span.org/program/public-affairs-event/trump-v-slaughter-oral-argument/669488
Bluesky:
jacobtlevy.bsky.social/post/3mph6n2467s2q
gregsargent.bsky.social/post/3mphaskezfk2v
kim.senate.gov/post/3mpgsjce63k2k
barbmcquade.bsky.social/post/3mpgwai6fnk2j
These decisions are not bugs--they are features. And this illegitimate court is not composed of philosophical originalists, however misguided, but rather of corrupt and jaded opportunists, traitors to their robes and their country.
Exactly. The Founders didn’t divide power because they assumed presidents could always be trusted. They divided it because they understood human nature. The real question isn’t whether any one president should have this authority. It’s whether the presidency itself should.