Supremely Disappointing
By
Jean Godden
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The Supreme Court last week ended its session with a swath of decisions and some deceptively rosy headlines: heralding the 5-4 ruling in favor of birthright citizenship. But relief that President Donald Trump’s life-long obsession with birthright citizenship had been quelled – at least temporarily — was mostly wishful thinking.
What legal scholars are seeing behind the smoke screen is far darker. They say the single most radical thing the court did wasn’t confirming birthright citizenship, but instead it was the dismantling of barriers that had long insulated a broad sector of the federal government from raw presidential control.
In Trump vs. Slaughter, the court approved Trump’s firing of Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, a Federal Trade Commissioner, and the last Democrat remaining on that commission. The issue was decided by a straight 6-3 ideological vote, allowing the president to fire without cause the regulators who had been protecting us from the exercise of raw executive power.
For nearly a century, Humphrey’s Executor v U.S. had been the precedent, requiring presidents to show cause, unusually defined as “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance of office,” before removing the heads of regulatory bodies like the FTC and other agencies created by Congress. Now a president can fire commissioners because they disagree with him or simply because he simply wants to.
https://www.postalley.org/2026/07/06/supremely-disappointing/