A sleepy little U.S. Supreme Court case by the perfect name of Trump v. Slaughter may end up upending the structural supports of the deep state in fantastical ways for the American people.
At issue is whether a President can fire government appointees at "independent agencies" or if they are outside the executive's control, despite being in the executive branch. President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to fire a Republican appointee to the Federal Trade Commission for not being aligned with his agenda. He argued fairly persuasively that there's no "fourth branch of government."
But in 1935, the Supreme Court ruled in Humphrey's Executor that Presidents cannot fire independent appointees, even if they're executive branch agencies such as the FTC. Basically, creating an institutional fourth branch. Like Roe v. Wade, the constitutionalists on the current Supreme Court see this as a badly decided case.
Our Founders would be in fiery opposition to these mini-fiefdom carveouts in their brilliant conception of the federal government. They believed, hardcore, that everyone in government needed to be accountable to the American people through elected representatives. These islands of unaccountability make rulings that can affect all Americans, yet are answerable to none, even the President.
Naturally, the likes of lightweight, expert-worshipping DEI appointee Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson seem to think this is just how it should be. Being a veritable factory outputting leftist tropes masquerading as legal opinions, Jackson said that some matters "should be handled by nonpartisan experts." Apparently, she believes there is such a thing as long as they agree with her. Otherwise, they are just "loyalists."
As she went on: "Having a president come in and fire the doctors, the scientists, the economists, and the PhDs and replacing them with loyalists or people who don't know anything… is not in the best interest of the citizens…We want independence in these agencies that the President doesn't control…"
"We want…"? Not even pretending to have a legal basis. She's not big on making legal arguments, citing cases, or referencing the Constitution. She does lean into pure, unadulterated leftist political nonsense. The DNC or AOC could write the same thing, word-for-word.
Not only is her case devoid of anything approaching a legal opinion, but it is also definitively wrong on Constitutional, practical, and moral grounds. There is no Constitutional support for federal independent agencies of any type — states have much more leeway, let alone agencies that answer to no one.
In fact, the Constitution opposes such agencies, as it places strict limitations on the federal government. President Obama, frustrated, called these restrictions "negative liberties," as though the federal government should have them.
Practically speaking, the KBJs argue that these agencies must be independent because we need nonpartisan "experts" to make the critical decisions in our federal government and that they can't be left to political hacks. But there is no such being as a "nonpartisan expert." There are no grand oracles are hovering above the fray for us little folks to defer to.
No better example of the fallacy of that assumption is Covid, in which KBJ's science and health experts got every single thing wrong, from the source of the virus, to the methods of spread, to how to slow the spread, to lockdowns, to the forced shots. In each of those decisions, they are now known to have been wrong, and the costs will go on for generations.
The intel agency and legal experts were also wrong on every major Trump "controversy." There was no Russian collusion, no pee tape, no impeachable offense for a phone call. But there was a Hunter Biden laptop. The experts were wrong everywhere.
Because of the enormous damage to America done by these unaccountable experts, it is morally imperative to make them all functionally accountable to the American people. The Founders set it up so we, the people, can make changes, and if we get it wrong, it is on us, and we can get it right in the next election. The deep state makes that impossible.
This functional change, which, it appears from the oral arguments, is likely to have a 6-3 majority to accomplish in overturning Slaughter, would finally be the breakthrough needed to start upending the deep state and return the government to the people.
Rod Thomson is a former daily newspaper reporter and columnist, Salem radio host and ABC TV commentator, and current Founder of The Thomson Group, a Florida-based political consulting firm. He has eight children and seven grandchildren and a rapacious hunger to fight for America for them. Follow him on Twitter at @Rod_Thomson. Email him at [email protected].
