The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments yesterday in a case with huge implications for both presidential power and the future of independent federal agencies. Yet the big question on the mind of the justices was seemingly not whether President Donald Trump should win—since they all seemed to accept that he was going to win, whether they individually liked it or not—but rather, the big question seemed to be just how broad or narrow Trump's legal victory was going to be.
The case is Trump v. Slaughter. At issue is Trump's purported firing of Rebecca Slaughter for purely political reasons from her position as a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Standing in the way of Trump's actions is a 1935 Supreme Court precedent called Humphrey's Executor v. United States, in which the Court unanimously held that President Franklin Roosevelt exceeded his lawful authority when he tried to fire an FTC commissioner for purely political reasons.
