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On Monday, the Supreme Court swung a wrecking ball into our federal government’s structure in Trump v. Slaughter, as the 6–3 conservative majority overturned a century’s old precedent and ruled that the president can now fire commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission for any reason whatsoever. This ruling undermines hundreds of statutes that created agencies that were once insulated from presidential control with political party requirements and removal restrictions. Nearly all federal agencies that everyday Americans rely on are now fully under President Donald Trump’s thumb. Worse, there are hidden dangers beyond the president firing high-ranking commissioners that the court failed to even acknowledge, ones that voters will need to prompt Congress to step in and correct before the presidency becomes too powerful to tame.

When Congress first created the FTC in the 1910s, it recognized that the agency’s mandates of protecting consumers and fighting monopolies should not be overly swayed by partisan politics. It therefore mandated that only three out of five commissioners at the top of the agency could be of the president’s party. Congress also decided that the president could only fire the commissioners for “inefficiency, malfeasance, or neglect,” also known as “for cause.” Just like a private employer might be required to provide some formal notice of poor performance before firing an employee, so too did the president need to identify some tangible reason why a commissioner was not performing their jobs properly. And the reason for firing couldn’t simply be that the president disagreed with the FTC commissioner’s policies, since that would go against Congress’ set-up of the agency that was meant to have some modicum of diversity of opinions and technical expertise.

But not anymore. As the Supreme Court held on Monday in a 6–3 opinion along partisan lines, for cause removal restrictions for nearly all boarded agencies are unconstitutional. The........

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