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.
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.