Supreme Court could give Trump full control over executive branch, if ruling goes his way

The Supreme Court of the United States is taking another look at a landmark case that could have huge ramifications.

Last week, SCOTUS revealed that it will be looking at the 1935 decision Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which Heritage Foundation legal fellow Hans von Spakovsky believes is on its last legs. He says that agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and others should not be immune to firings from the President of the United States.

“The Constitution says the president is the head of the executive branch,” he said to 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.’”

The news comes amid a challenge to President Donald Trump’s authority by former FTC employee Rebecca Slaughter, appointed by former President Joe Biden and fired by Trump shortly after the latter took office. SCOTUS ruled 6-3 that Slaughter could remain at her job while they revisit the 1935 decision to see if it still holds up.

“I think this ruling will necessarily reach beyond the FTC,”  said South Texas College of Law professor Joshua Blackman. “The only question is whether they maintain that the Federal Reserve is different.”

“Von Spakovsky said the Supreme Court has been inching toward addressing Humphrey’s. The 2010 decision to narrow the Sarbanes-Oxley Act by stripping independence from an accounting oversight board and the decision five years ago finding the president could fire the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director at will were hints of this,” Fox News reported.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the latter case that the president has the power “to remove — and thus supervise — those who wield executive power on his behalf follows from the text of Article II.”

If SCOTUS decides the overturn Humphrey’s, it could expand the power of the executive branch, effectively giving Trump and all presidents after him sole control over the branch.

“Boston University School of Law professor Jed Shugerman said in a statement online that Trump has done ‘more to establish a unitary executive than all the judges and legal scholars in the world could ever do,’” Fox News continued, saying that Shugerman also slammed Trump has having “done more to discredit and expose the unitary executive theory as lawless authoritarianism than any judge or legal scholar could ever do.”

Writer/Columnist

Sierra Marlee is a millennial whose hunger for the truth in a world of fake news has led her to BizPac Review.

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