Don Surber
Rebecca Kelly Slaughter is not my president
Randy Barnett, a law professor at Georgetown, succinctly got to the bottom of Trump v. Slaughter, a case before the Supreme Court. Trump fired Slaughter from the Federal Trade Commission, which the press in its rabbit-brained grasp of the world describes as an independent agency. My readers dismiss the existence of independent agencies as a fairy tale because they know the president is the chief of the executive branch of government.
Professor Barnett tweeted:
Argument: Allowing the Prez to remove administrative officials will transfer an enormous amount of power to the Prez.
Question: Transfer from whom? Who currently has all that power?
Ah.
Trump appointed Rebecca Kelly Slaughter to the commission in 2018 to fill a Democrat seat on the commission. Her expertise stems from employment in a 2,300-lawyer law firm with 21 offices across 4 continents. She also worked for Chuckles the Clown Schumer. Her claim to fame, according to Wikipedia, is that she became “the first woman to give birth while serving on the FTC.”
That must have been one helluva commission meeting.
In his second presidency, Trump fired her and she sued. Biden-appointed Judge Loren AliKhan blocked the firing. Her claim to Wikipedia fame is “She is the first female South Asian American federal judge to serve on the District of Columbia District Court.”
These claims remind me that Hall of Famer Ken Griffey Jr. is the second-best left-handed outfielder born on a November 21 in Donora, Pennsylvania, because he was born on Stan Musial’s birthday in their shared hometown.
An appellate court agreed with the first female South Asian American federal judge to serve on the District of Columbia District Court. Trump appealed and the Supreme Court gave him a quick (by court standards) full hearing on Monday.
AP reported:
The court’s conservative majority suggested it would overturn a unanimous 90-year-old decision that has limited when presidents can fire agencies’ board members, or leave it with only its shell intact.
Chief Justice John Roberts referred to the decision known as Humphrey’s Executor as “a dry husk.”
Liberal justices warned that the decision sought by the administration would concentrate vast power in the president’s hands, robbing the agencies of expertise.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the president would be able to “fire all the scientists and the doctors and the economists and the PhDs and replace them with loyalists and people who don’t know anything.”
Humphrey’s Executor refers to FDR firing William Ewart Humphrey from the FTC.
His expertise consisted of being a former congressman who ran for the Senate and lost. He replaced FTC commissioner Joseph H. Gaskill, whose expertise consisted of being in the Great War. Gaskill replaced Samuel Huston Thompson, whose expertise, according to Wikipedia, stemmed from being “the first head football coach at Texas to return for a second season.” His entry is about his coaching record at Oberlin and the like. Thompson was a founding member of the FTC.
Getting back to FDR firing Humphrey, he sued but died before the case could be heard. The court allowed the executor of his will to continue the case to collect back pay for his heirs.
Let’s get real. The FTC is a board of political hacks. A football coach, war veteran and a former congressman are not experts on trade, but who really is an expert on trade? The agency’s job is to enforce civil laws dealing with deceptive advertising and consumer protection. I am OK with membership on the FTC board remaining a patronage job because it makes it harder to sabotage Trump or any president if he can fire you.
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I really have had it with experts after the covid panic of 2020. The lesson from that is to quit giving the experts extra-constitutional protection from being fired. Tony Fauci spent 40 years heading an agency created to cure AIDS. We are no closer today than we ever were, but we do now have an expensive array of pharmaceuticals to address the symptoms.
But my opinion doesn’t matter. The 9 justices will decide if political appointees serve at the will and pleasure of the president, i.e. the American people.
To that end, Politico reported:
The Supreme Court signaled Monday that it’s prepared to hand President Donald Trump another win in his drive to consolidate his power over federal agencies.
During arguments over Trump’s dismissal of Federal Trade Commission member Rebecca Slaughter, the high court’s conservative majority appeared intent on overturning or effectively gutting a 90-year-old precedent that upheld restrictions on the president’s ability to fire leaders of independent agencies across the executive branch.
“I think broad delegations to unaccountable independent agencies raise enormous constitutional and real world problems for individual liberty,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh said during the arguments.
NBC cut to the chase, reporting, “The court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, has already signaled, with strong opposition from the three liberal justices, that Trump is likely to win the case by allowing Slaughter, a Democrat, to be removed from office while the litigation continues.”
It is rather odd to describe an agency as nonpartisan when it is run by a board that has Democrat seats and Republican seats.
Scotus Blog reported:
A decision in favor of the Trump administration would significantly increase the president’s power over not only the FTC but roughly two dozen other multi-member agencies that Congress intended to be independent. President Donald Trump has also fired members of the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The Supreme Court has already allowed those firings to take effect in proceedings on its interim docket, but the court’s ruling in the case of FTC commissioner Rebecca Slaughter will provide a more definitive ruling on the legality of those firings.
Congress can intend all it wants, but the Constitution decides whether Congress has the power to dodge the president’s authority to serve as chief of the executive branch.
If you don’t want a president to have all that power, get rid of the agencies.
My answer to Barnett’s question is the court should transfer the power back to the president because he needs to hold the bureaucracy accountable. |
