An upcoming Supreme Court case has massive implications for the structure of the federal government.
As reported by Fox News, President Donald Trump has been building a case to overturn a 90-year-old precedent, known as Humphrey’s Executor.
The 1935 decision places limits on the president’s power to fire independent agency officials.
Humphrey’s Executor is widely seen as critical to the power of the so-called administrative state, sometimes known as the fourth branch of government to detractors.
In recent months, Trump has been challenging Humphrey’s by firing various independent agency heads without cause.
The Supreme Court has sided with Trump in these controversies, overruling lower courts that have tried to block him.
The latest development came last week when the court permitted Trump to fire a Biden-appointed Federal Trade Commission (FTC) official, Rebecca Slaughter.
Not only did the court let Trump fire Slaughter, for now, but the justices also agreed to examine Humphrey’s, which Slaughter has cited in her defense.
The ruling split the court’s conservative majority and its vocal liberal wing, which accused the court of “raring to” overturn the New Deal-era ruling.
“The majority may be raring to take that action,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote.
“But until the deed is done, Humphrey’s controls, and prevents the majority from giving the President the unlimited removal power Congress denied him.”
The Humphrey’s ruling stems from the time of President FDR, who tried to fire a Republican member of the FTC over a policy dispute.
In its brief to the court, the Trump administration argued that the FTC has absorbed “considerable executive power in the intervening 90 years” since Humphrey’s, placing the president’s authority at risk.
A Supreme Court ruling tossing Humphrey’s would be a massive victory for conservatives who hold to the so-called “unitary executive theory,” which views the sprawling administrative state as an unconstitutional growth on the legitimate structure of the government.
To many on the Left, Humphrey’s is seen as critical to checking Trump’s so-called autocratic ambitions.
However, the Supreme Court has, broadly speaking, shown sympathy for Trump’s view of executive power.
Hans von Spakovsky, a legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, told Fox News that Humphrey’s is on “life support.”
Van Spakovsky noted that the Supreme Court’s conservatives have long been skeptical of independent agencies wielding executive power on the president’s behalf.
“The Constitution says the president is the head of the executive branch,” von Spakovsky told Fox News Digital.
“That means, just like the CEO of a big corporation, they get to supervise and run the entire corporation, or in this case, the entire executive branch, and you can’t have Congress taking parts of that away from him and saying, ‘Well, they’re going to keep doing executive branch things, including law enforcement, but you won’t have any control over them.’”
Meanwhile, Trump has asked the Supreme Court to uphold his firing of Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook over mortgage fraud allegations.
The Supreme Court gave a cryptic hint of how it may treat the controversy in a separate dispute, noting the Fed is a “uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.”
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