New Republic
The Supreme Court Gave Trump Almost Everything He Wanted
There was good news and bad news from the Supreme Court on Monday. We’ll start with the former. In an extraordinary 5-4 ruling in Trump v. Cook, the court held that President Donald Trump cannot summarily fire a Federal Reserve governor without cause, thereby shielding the nation’s central bank from direct presidential control.Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote for the court, held that Congress could lawfully shield Federal Reserve members from removal without cause because of the Fed’s unique role in American governance. In doing so, he and the other justices in the majority—Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the court’s three liberal members—sidestepped some of the court’s normal procedural hurdles.“We see no reason to leave the public in limbo, or to sow doubt as to the status of one of our nation’s (and the world’s) most important financial institutions,” he explained in his majority opinion, quoting from precedent. “Although we appreciate that others may see matters differently, we would not so quickly unsettle this ‘special arrangement sanctioned by history.’”Unfortunately, the court’s deference to Congress on removal protections applies only to the Federal Reserve. The court’s conservative majority simultaneously held that Trump could fire Democratic appointees at the Federal Trade Commission in Trump v. Slaughter, clearing the path for him to wield much greater influence over other financial regulatory agencies.The 6-3 decision is a generational victory for the conservative legal movement, which has spent the last few decades trying to bring independent federal agencies under the heel of Republican presidents. The high court also overturned a New Deal-era precedent that allowed Congress to protect the leaders of federal financial regulators from dismissal without cause in Slaughter. In doing so, it opened some of the nation’s most important governing institutions to the day-to-day whims of a corrupt president.Taken together, Cook and Slaughter divided the Supreme Court into three camps. One of them, represented by the court’s three liberal justices, would have upheld the status quo for independent federal agencies. In their view, Congress can give certain federal agencies a measure of independence from the White House by only allowing the president to fire the agencies’ leaders for cause.This also happened to be the status quo for at least the last century of American history. In 1935, the Supreme Court ruled in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States that the president could not lawfully remove a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission except for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” Prior to Slaughter, no president had sought to dismiss a FTC commissioner, either for cause or without it.While presidents have the power to remove executive-branch officers by default, the Humphrey’s Executor court reasoned, Congress could impose limits if the agency in question also exercised “quasi-legislative” or “quasi-judicial” power. Agency independence became particularly important with financial regulators as a check on corruption and safeguard of public confidence.“Congress and more than a dozen Presidents have relied on Humphrey’s to construct a workable government, creating many other agencies in the FTC’s tradition,” Sotomayor explained in her Cook dissent, which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “Today, 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.”Last year, Trump began to challenge Humphrey’s Executor by firing the heads of certain federal agencies without cause. The president had long sought to exercise more direct control over federal agencies, though he lacked the interest or drive to do so during his first term. After his return to power last year, Trump ended the Justice Department’s post-Watergate tradition of independence, staffed other agencies with personal loyalists, and sought to remove Democratic appointees of multi-member regulatory agencies.The Supreme Court proved eager to help him wage this war against what conservatives had long derided as the “administrative state.” The justices effectively signaled that Humphrey’s Executor was a dead letter in a shadow-docket ruling in Wilcox v. Trump. (The court also addressed the Federal Reserve in that case, but we’ll come back to that later.)Technically, however, that ruling remained the law of the land when Trump dismissed FTC commissioner Rebecca Slaughter last year. Slaughter challenged her dismissal in federal court, noting that Congress had insulated commissioners like herself from presidential removal without cause and that Humphrey’s Executor remained good law. The Trump administration argued that the Supreme Court had repeatedly narrowed Humphrey’s Executor, particularly in recent years, and that it was finally time to scrap it altogether.“Although it is up to the Senate to decide whether to confirm those with whom the President would prefer to work, neither Congress nor the courts may saddle him with those with whom he cannot work,” Roberts wrote for the court. “Subordinates who exercise the President’s power are subject to removal by him. Then, and only then, can they remain accountable to the President, and the President to the people.”To reach this conclusion, Roberts crystallized a rigid interpretation of the separation of powers. He spun a tale of the Constitutional Convention where early American luminaries reached “the Decision of 1789,” which gave the president a broad power to remove subordinate officers at will. Roberts pointed to the 1926 ruling Myers v. United States, in which then-Chief Justice William Howard Taft—a former president himself—asserted a broad removal power over congressional encroachments since Reconstruction.Congress may establish independent agencies “to assist it with its functions,” Roberts claimed, but could not “foist those agencies upon the president, and thus deprive him of the ‘executive power vested [in him] by the Constitution.’” The president-as-victim framework is a defining trait of the unitary executive theory, which often paints the executive branch as an avatar of the popular will that is shackled by a burdensome legislature and a meddlesome court.Indeed, in Roberts’ opinion in Slaughter, the legislative branch is framed as a disembodied, eldritch force that constantly tries to undermine the executive. “Since its creation in 1914, the FTC has accumulated vast rulemaking, enforcement, and adjudicatory powers under more than 80 statutes,” Roberts noted at one point. One might also describe that as the legislative process. To the conservative majority, however, Congress is treated as some kind of natural force to be endured and resisted, like rust or erosion.What is actually being washed away is a century of American governance that brought individual prosperity and economic growth, even if Americans did not actively realize it. “Today, the majority replaces 90 years of proven, workable practice with a half-baked theory of executive power that is simultaneously all encompassing yet also subject to necessary but undefined exceptions,” Sotomayor wrote in her Slaughter dissent. “The one thing that does appear to be clear going forward is that chaos will follow.”The second camp is Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who sided with their conservative colleagues in Slaughter but formed a majority with the liberal justices in Cook. They sought to harmonize a unitary executive with the practical necessity of the Federal Reserve’s independence.Lisa Cook, the latter case’s titular plaintiff, became the first Black woman to serve on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors when the Senate confirmed her appointment in 2022. As one of the board’s seven members, Cook is charged with overseeing the nation’s monetary system. She also automatically serves on the Federal Open Markets Committee, which is best known for setting interest rates.Since its establishment in 1913, the Fed has served as the nation’s de facto central bank. Congress sought to protect its decision-making process from day-to-day political meddling by only allowing governors to be removed by the president for cause. Lawmakers hoped to avoid a scenario where a president would install pliant governors who would prioritize the White House’s short-term political interests over the long-term stability of the American financial system.Past presidents have obeyed the law even when they sharply disagreed with the Fed’s decisions. That century-long status quo came to an end after Trump was elected to his first term in 2016. The president had long advocated for lower interest rates that would make it easier for businesses to borrow money. While lower interest rates can stimulate economic growth in the short term, the Federal Reserve is also charged by Congress with ensuring that inflation stays within a 2 percent growth rate.Things came to a head in 2018 and 2019 when Trump openly criticized Jerome Powell, the then-Fed chairman, for supporting higher interest rates to cool what economic experts saw as excessive asset prices. Trump himself had appointed Powell to the chairmanship in 2018, only to sour on him as Trump’s trade war with China dragged on the economy. In one notable Twitter post in the summer of 2019, Trump publicly questioned whether “our bigger enemy” was Powell or Chinese President Xi Jinping. (It was unclear whether “our” referred to the United States or to Trump himself.)Ironically, Powell turned out to be the most competent public servant appointed by the first Trump administration. He received widespread and bipartisan praise for stabilizing the American economy as the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged American businesses and workers. Powell is also credited with managing the “soft landing” by raising interest rates enough to cool inflation during the Biden administration but without short-circuiting economic growth.While Trump had stopped criticizing Powell in 2020 and redirected his energies to other matters, the president returned to office in 2025 on a mission to bring the Fed to heel. The White House moved quickly to destroy the Justice Department’s traditional independence upon taking office by staffing it with Trump’s former personal lawyers; the Supreme Court also cleared the way for Trump to remove protected Democratic appointees at a wide range of federal agencies during Trump’s first year.At the same time, the Supreme Court signaled that it would not brook an attack on the Fed’s independence. In Wilcox, the aforementioned shadow-docket case, one of the Democratic appointees on the National Labor Relations Board who had been removed by Trump warned that her ouster could pave the way for an attack on the Fed. Not so, said the justices. The Fed, they wrote, “is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.”Trump did not get the message. Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Financial Agency, spent the summer of 2025 accusing various Democrats and Trump political targets of mortgage fraud. Among them was Cook, though the allegations against her appear dubious at best. In August, Pulte referred her to the Justice Department for prosecution. Trump used the referral as a pretext for her dismissal.At Trump’s behest, federal prosecutors in D.C. also opened a criminal investigation into Powell claiming that he had misled Congress about a renovation project at the Federal Reserve’s headquarters. Powell announced in a video message in January that he had been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury over the claims. Amid significant blowback on Capitol Hill, even among Republicans, the Justice Department dropped the spurious probe in April.Roberts, this time in Cook, leaned heavily on the idea that the Fed was a true constitutional successor to the First and Second Banks of the United States. This is only somewhat true: The early republic’s central banks were structurally quite different than the Fed is, and they operated in substantially different economic contexts. No matter, the chief justice wrote, because the linkage is enough to give a “history and tradition” rationale for distinguishing the Fed from the FTC.“It is true, of course, that this tradition has not stood still; as Justice [Clarence] Thomas notes, the Federal Reserve is more powerful than its predecessors, managing a vastly more complex economy in a vastly more complex world,” Roberts explained, referencing his colleagues’ dissent. “We see no reason, however, why our central bank ought to be ‘trapped in amber’ any more than any other aspect of our constitutional scheme.”Roberts did not directly reference the court’s Slaughter ruling in his majority opinion and focused largely on Myers. Reconciling the two decisions instead fell to Kavanaugh in his concurring opinion. His reasoning is largely pragmatic: the Fed “occupies a unique role in the U.S. Government and maintains critical responsibility for the stability and success of the U.S. and world economies,” and it also “follows in a distinct historical tradition of central bank independence that has long coexisted with Article II.”All of which brings us to the third camp. Neither Roberts nor Kavanaugh proved persuasive to the court’s other conservatives, who chose ideological purity over the nation’s financial stability. “Today’s decision is an unprecedented incursion on the executive branch,” Thomas complained in his dissent. “Neither the parties nor the court can point to a single time in American history that this court has upheld an injunction against the President’s removal of an executive officer. In the 237-year history of our Constitution, this court has, by all accounts, never done so.”
Other conservative justices were more cautious. Justice Samuel Alito, in a concurring opinion joined by Gorsuch, suggested that the court could have granted Trump’s request for a stay and left a host of constitutional questions for future briefing. This would have had the practical effect of removing Cook from office, which in turn would effectively decide the case. (Other officials who were denied interim relief often resigned rather than live without a paycheck indefinitely during litigation.)Alito’s response to Roberts’s concerns about the stability of the American financial system was essentially one step short of denying them. “Granting a stay on the ground set out above would have had no such effect,” he speculated. “It would have simply returned the case to the courts below so that the litigation could continue in the normal course.” If the markets only responded to cold logic, this would be a stronger argument. Instead they would have likely drawn the easiest conclusion: the Fed’s independence, once rock-solid, was no longer indisputable.It must be stressed that the outcome in Cook is, indeed, good news. The ruling does not represent the end of the road for Cook herself, who must continue to defend herself against allegations of mortgage fraud. But it does send a strong signal from the high court to the country—to markets, to banks and businesses, and most importantly to presidents—that the Fed’s independence remains functionally intact. It is easy to scoff at this, but financial crises never limit their damage to the people responsible for them. It’s not hard to see Roberts’s invocations of the dangers of “leaving the public in limbo,” or otherwise “sowing doubt,” as a nod toward preventing panic in the marketplace.At the same time, Slaughter represents a landmark victory for the conservative legal establishment. It will allow presidents to exert unchallenged control over major financial regulators like the FTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as a host of other independent agencies like the National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Communications Commission. It enshrines a radical expansion of presidential power into the law of the land and further diminishes Congress’s central role in the American constitutional order. “Many do not share the court’s rosy appraisal of the past century,” Thomas complained towards the end of his Cook dissent. Rarely is the conservative legal movement described so succinctly. Both the American economy and Americans’ quality of life grew by leaps and bounds over that timespan, thanks at least in part to competent regulatory institutions that combined the executive branch’s flexibility with the legislative branch’s stability. The party is now over.
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