Roberts Slaughters the Deep State
The Roberts Supreme Court has given us a frustratingly mixed bag of rulings in the past 24 hours, but one crucial ruling that it got exactly right was Trump v. Slaughter.
That headline is a cheap bait-and-switch, folks, but not as cheap as it might seem. Because, aside from today’s birthright citizenship ruling, if there was one Supreme Court case that we really really needed to go our way, it was yesterday’s Trump v. Slaughter ruling.
And it did. In striking a restorative blow for executive power, the Court yesterday ruled that the long-espoused and mischievously applied canard that there are “independent” agencies within the executive branch is just that — a canard.
No, Chief Justice John Roberts didn’t, in his majority opinion, use the word “canard,” nor did he call our nation’s behemoth federal bureaucracy a contrivance of Big Government, nor did he say that the Court’s ruling gives relief to future Republican presidents against the slow-walking and the outright sabotage of their agenda by a permanently embedded Deep State that is overwhelmingly left-leaning — but he might just as well have.
As Roberts put it, these unelected bureaucrats are “envoys of the president, not his equals.”
Genau das, as they say in German. As The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board writes, “The case arose after President Trump fired Rebecca Slaughter, a Biden appointee, from the Federal Trade Commission. Ms. Slaughter challenged her removal under the Court’s Humphrey’s Executor (1935) precedent, which was grounded on the misconception that the FTC’s duties are ‘neither political nor executive, but predominantly quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative.’”
The ruling, as Roberts put it, affirms “what has been clear for a century — that those who fall within the President’s ‘general administrative control’ must be removable by the President at will.”
Since the early years of FDR’s administration, presidents had been hamstrung by the Court’s errant and damaging Humphrey’s Executor decision. Until yesterday. Going forward, Donald Trump and every Republican successor will be able to carry out their elective mandate without having to worry about leftist saboteurs within the Deep State. Thus, the Roberts Court affirmed an executive mandate that the Founders had always envisioned while throat-punching a destructive Deep State that they never could’ve imagined.
Alas, where the Roberts Court giveth, it also taketh away. In a 5-4 decision, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh joining Roberts and the Court’s three leftists, the Court ruled that while Trump was free to fire employees under him within the executive branch, he couldn’t fire wayward Federal Reserve governors, like Biden appointee Lisa Cook. Why not, I wonder?
As National Review’s editors opine, “If we’ve had fewer financial crises and depressions on the Fed’s watch, we have not had zero, and there’s nobody to hold accountable when they happen. Moreover, any government agency that needs answer to nobody is prone to mission creep.”
Mission creep is real, and so is human bias, and we’ve certainly seen the latter in the Fed’s efforts to rescue the moribund economies of Barack Obama and Joe Biden while continuing to apply the monetary brakes on Donald Trump’s economy. “Our guess,” say the Journal’s editors, “is that the Chief and Justice Kavanaugh made the pragmatic judgment that they simply don’t trust Mr. Trump to run monetary policy. They’re right on the politics, but Justice [Clarence] Thomas makes a powerful case on the law.”
Apparently, they’d rather have a constitutionally dubious fourth branch of government than side with Trump. Whatever, dudes.
If the president controls the executive branch, and doesn’t control the Fed, then National Review’s editors correctly write, “What is the Fed? It’s not a legislature, because Article I creates only two houses of Congress. It’s not a court. The Constitution doesn’t mention a fourth branch. But now we have one.”
Roberts is, above all, an institutionalist — not an originalist or a strict constructionist. In other words, he’s a Swamp Dweller and a judicial coward. One need only consider his rescuing of ObamaCare to understand this. And indeed, he and Justice Amy Coney Barrett ruled in favor of Chinese Communist birth tourism, as well as birth tourism from every Third World country and every enemy of our American Experiment.
Perhaps a constitutional amendment can gain support among the American people once they begin to realize the damage that this misreading of our Constitution has caused. Unfortunately, we’re stuck, likely, with John Roberts for as long as he lives.
