The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that removal protections for members of the Federal Trade Commission are unconstitutional and overturned a 90-year-old decision that allowed Congress to shield members of certain independent agencies from being fired by the president at will.
The decision from the high court expands the president’s power over many independent boards and commissions, which Congress had insulated from political pressure by saying their members could only be removed by the president for cause.
So let me get this straight. An independent agency can now be swayed by administration? As is now they are not considered independent agency. SCOTUS is literally rewriting the dictionary.
Not quite. The court’s position is that there cannot exist an independent agency. They don’t see any provision for such a thing in the constitution. And if you take a purely literal originalist interpretation of the constitution, they’re right. Nothing in there says anything about “independent agencies”. Such independence was established ~140 years ago by precedent. So they’re not rewriting the dictionary, but they’re certainly rewriting a core legal doctrine that has been in place for >50% of the nations existence.
In my opinion, assuming there’s ever actually an opportunity to fix this mess, a key change we’ll need to make is that there needs to be a higher standard for the supreme court to overturn its own precedent. Like, maybe the vote needs to be unanimous or something. This activist court has been decades in the making, and is radically rewriting much of the foundational doctrine under which the country has operated for generations.
This is what I don’t understand either. John Roberts said:
Like, what? What sense does this make? Does this not objectively make it NOT independent? Does this not objectively destroy the separation of powers? Why is an independent agency accountable to the president? Aren’t they there to serve the people only and not one person in the white house? How are they exercising the “presidents power?” The president(very purposefully) is not supposed to have that power. They do. That’s… kinda the point. Isn’t that like the definition of an independent agency? I don’t understand what he’s even trying to say here.
The idea is that the president works with these people and can’t be forced to work with people who will not work with him. So the fix is for Congress to move these agencies back under the legislative branch instead of the executive branch, or you are just going to see more seesawing of people getting fired every 4-8 years even more than we currently have.
Reads like totalitarian propaganda.
Of course it makes no sense, it’s just a word salad to make it look like there’s some justification behind it, when in reality it’s just another step into autocracy.