What is Congress for? According to the supreme court, not very much. On Monday, the supreme court overturned Humphrey’s Executor, a 91-year-old precedent, nullified the Federal Trade Commission Act, a 112-year-old law, and presumed to settle a 250-year-old debate on the scope of presidential authority when it reapportioned power away from the people’s representatives in the House and Senate and gave it instead to Donald Trump. In Trump v Slaughter, the court ruled that that the heads of independent agencies that Congress created cannot be protected from arbitrary firings by laws that Congress passed. Instead, Donald Trump is now free to fire agency heads at will and to replace them with political loyalists, regardless of what Congress has said about it.

The ruling has one key exception: Donald Trump does not, according to the justices, have the ability to fire members of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve without cause and without proper procedure. A separate decision found for Lisa Cook, the Joe Biden appointee who was the first Black woman to serve on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, and who was fired via social media post by Donald Trump last year. In addition to Cook’s job, the decision protects the independence of the Federal Reserve and the health of financial markets, to say nothing of the considerable personal wealth of the justices themselves.

But the Slaughter decision marks yet another expansion of the president’s power, yet another blow to Congress’ prerogatives, and yet another in a long line of attacks on the court’s favorite bete noir: the “administrative state”, that vast network of independent agencies and commissions, staffed by experts and bureaucrats and dully........

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