Proving that history does repeat itself, in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to fire an FTC commissioner over ideological disagreements. In that case, called Humphrey’s Executor, the court unanimously held that while the president has the power to remove purely executive officers for any reason, that unlimited power does not extend to agencies like the FTC, whose duties “are neither political nor executive, but predominantly quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative.”
Following that 1935 decision, Congress went on to create many more multimember, independent agencies whose members likewise can only be removed for cause. Since January, Trump has also removed Democratic members from some of those agencies, including the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
That people still think we can vote our way out of this is insane.
The ignorance is astounding.
The American people were repeatedly warned. They chose to ignore those warnings. Now we’re going to have to go through a period of a significant decline in quality of life and probably violence to get back to where we were.
We were not fucking around when we said the Republican party was dangerous and had fascist tendencies. That was not an exaggeration.