For more than a decade, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has chipped away at Congress’s power to insulate independent agencies from politics, which lawmakers have historically done by putting limits on the president’s authority to fire their leaders.
Several conservative justices have signaled for years that they were ready to overturn the 1935 precedent — Humphrey’s Executor v. United States — at issue in the case before the court on Monday.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in a 2010 opinion in Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Oversight Board that the president’s power generally includes “the authority to remove those who assist him in carrying out his duties. Without such power, the president could not be held fully accountable for discharging his own responsibilities.”
During Mr. Trump’s first term in 2020, the court took another step toward expanding the president’s authority to oust independent officials. In a 5-to-4 decision in Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the court said the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was unconstitutional because it did not allow the president to fire the director without cause.
But the majority decision distinguished between government agencies run by a single director and those led by multimember commissions that “do not wield substantial executive power.”
Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch said they were eager to go further. The 1935 precedent, Justice Thomas wrote, “poses a direct threat to our constitutional structure and, as a result, the liberty of the American people.”
In its recent emergency orders, the court has also signaled that it is now poised to give the president more direct control over the multimember commissions as well.
“Because the Constitution vests the executive power in the president,” the majority said in an unsigned opinion in May, “he may remove without cause executive officers who exercise that power on his behalf, subject to narrow exceptions recognized by our precedents.”
Ann Marimow covers the Supreme Court for The Times from Washington.
The post Supreme Court’s Conservatives Have Already Narrowed the 1935 Precedent appeared first on New York Times.
