Law Dork: “A 90-year-old precedent meant nothing to the majority allowing Trump to fire an FTC commissioner during litigation. This is no way to run a court, let alone a country. The U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican appointees on Monday issued an order allowing President Donald Trump’s purported firing of Rebecca Slaughter as a Democratic commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission to take effect while litigation proceeds, while also stating that the court would be taking up the Justice Department’s appeal of the case to decide whether a 90-year-old precedent that would bar Trump’s firing of Slaughter should be overturned. I am sorry if you needed to read that a few times, but its absurdity needed to be fully laid out and not oversimplified. Yes, if you’ve gotten it, the Supreme Court is putting the cart before the horse. The Republican appointees, over the pointed objection of the Democratic appointees, are allowing Trump’s firing to take effect before the court even “decides” whether Trump’s firing is allowed because the majority, in the future, is (apparently) likely to overturn the 90-year-old Humphrey’s Executor precedent. Under the ruling, Congress could create agencies that had some independence — for example, by legislating restrictions on presidential removal of officials from the leadership of those agencies — provided the agencies in question have multimember, bipartisan leadership. This ruling led to a widespread understanding within the federal government, and Congress passed laws — and created so-called independent agencies — accordingly. Chief Justice John Roberts and the conservative majority has pulled back on some of the more loose interpretations of that rule over the past 15 years, like when Congress created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and tried to give its single director “for cause” removal protection, but overturning Humphrey’s Executor would be a wholesale pullback of congressional power in this area. Further still, the majority also asked the parties to brief and argue whether a court can issue an order “prevent[ing] a person’s removal from public office” at all. A ruling in the negative there could make it so that courts are extremely limited in their remedy should a president illegally — or even unconstitutionally — fire someone. It is an order that either means there is no stability left in the law or, at best, there is no precedent if the reactionary, right-wing-controlled court says so. And, because of the way the majority is doing this, the Trump administration does not even need to wait for the precedent to be overturned. It can act contrary to precedent, and Chief Justice John Roberts and his merry band of Republican appointees will make it so. Before they formally make it so. This is not the first time we have seen this move, either. The majority — albeit, without Roberts — did the same thing back in 2021, when they allowed Texas’s S.B. 8 vigilante enforcement ban to go into effect despite the fact that it was clearly unconstitutional then because Roe v. Wade had not yet been overturned. Although clearly an important matter, the difference is notable. That was over a state law. This is a situation in which the court is allowing a properly enacted federal law — setting forth FTC commissioners’ removal restrictions — to be ignored before ruling on whether it is going to overturn a longstanding precedent that would then allow it to reach a different conclusion about the constitutionality of the law. Neither is proper. One disrespects federalism (and, in that case, the Supremacy Clause). The other disrespects separation of powers…”