The Supreme Court hears arguments in a case about President Trump's firing of a Federal Trade Commissioner. At stake is a 90-year precedent limiting the president's power over independent agencies.

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.

  • flamiera@kbin.melroy.org
    12·
    3 months ago

    By this point, I am almost afraid to think that even voting as the solution is beyond us. Americans have allowed for too long, horrible politicians to carve this level of corruption to pretty much breed into it’s current form and that form is Trump and his administration.

    Because if we somehow get a Democratic president in, they’re going to see all of the changes of what Trump has done and they either have to live with them or commit political suicide in trying to change them. Because we’ve been demanding it, some shit needed to be codified so we can end this see-saw bullshit of Republican comes in, undoes this and that, we have to wait until someone Democratic comes in, redoes this and that. That kind of system has only been damaging and damaging.

    And it’s like nobody heeds these warnings. They think if we just simply vote one party out, things will magically get better. That’s not how it’s going to work and we’re still in year fucking 1 of this shitshow damaging the country even more. In 3 years time even with the mid-terms, does anyone think that’s going to stop this continually law-breaking administration?

    • NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io
      1·
      3 months ago

      By this point, I am almost afraid to think that even voting as the solution is beyond us.

      Exactly. Trump is a symptom, not the cause (and that’s before we get into how he’d probably rather launch a coup than lose his majority in 2026).