Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson came out swinging on Monday in Trump v. Slaughter, and her target wasn’t just the Trump administration, but the entire idea that the President actually runs the executive branch. In a performance that could’ve been mistaken for a TED Talk on how wonderful bureaucracy is, Jackson defended every alphabet-soup agency in Washington as if they were sacred relics instead of the unelected regulatory class most Americans never voted for and never wanted running their lives.
The case itself is simple. President Trump fired two Democrat FTC commissioners, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, back in March. As FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson put it, “President Donald J. Trump is the head of the executive branch and is vested with all of the executive power in our government. I have no doubts about his constitutional authority to remove Commissioners.” That is Article II in plain English. The President hires, the President fires.
But Slaughter and Bedoya did what Democrats do whenever voters reject them. They sued to get their jobs back. A Biden-appointed judge ordered Slaughter reinstated, the D.C. Circuit upheld it, and suddenly Humphrey’s Executor, a 90-year-old case that has propped up the modern bureaucratic empire, was dragged back into the spotlight. SCOTUS stepped in, put everything on pause, and agreed to hear the case.
That’s when Justice Jackson launched her full sermon on why “experts” should basically outrank the President. According to her, the President shouldn’t control transportation regulators, economic agencies, the Fed, or any multimember boards. She said, “having a President come in and fire all the scientists, and the doctors, and the economists, and the PhDs… is actually not in the best interest of the citizens of the United States.” Then she dropped the line that could’ve been written by the DNC’s donor class: “These issues should not be in presidential control.”
She even invoked “monarchy,” which is rich coming from someone arguing that permanent bureaucrats should rule the country with zero accountability.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh cut through the theatrics with a brutal hypothetical. What happens when one party stacks these so-called independent agencies right before losing power, specifically to sabotage the next President? That is not a theoretical situation. It is exactly what the left has been doing for years.
This case is shaping up to be a direct challenge to the administrative state’s favorite shield. If Trump wins, presidents will finally be able to fire bureaucrats who spend their days pretending expertise equals authority. Jackson’s meltdown shows exactly why this fight matters. The unelected want to stay unelected, and they’re terrified the Constitution might actually mean what it says.
Leave a Comment