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Supreme Court to weigh protections for agencies

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to formally consider overruling its 90-year-old precedent that enables Congress to provide certain agencies with a degree of independence from the White House, a major test of President Trump’s expansive assertion of presidential power.

© Greg Nash

The justices are set to review Trump’s contention that he can fire independent agency leaders at will, an argument that casts their for-cause removal protections as infringing on the separation of powers.

Oral arguments are set for December, with a decision expected by next summer.

Until then, the court’s order temporarily greenlights Trump’s firing of Federal Trade Commission (FTC) member Rebecca Slaughter over the dissents of the court’s three liberal justices.

The majority did not explain their reasoning, but Justice Elena Kagan wrote a brief dissent criticizing her colleagues for the emergency intervention.

“Our emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars,” Kagan wrote, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

“Still more, it should not be used, as it also has been, to transfer government authority from Congress to the President, and thus to reshape the Nation’s separation of powers,” Kagan continued.

© The Hill