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Supreme Court’s ‘Slaughter’ Decision Is a Historic Gift of American Independence

15 0
03.07.2026

In the flurry of decisions the U.S. Supreme Court released at the end of June, one stands out as of extraordinary historical importance and an urgently necessary restoration of a fundamental principle of the nation’s founding. The Court’s ruling in Trump v. Slaughter is a sweeping affirmation of the president’s power to remove and replace officials of executive branch agencies and independent boards created by federal law, without interference from the courts or Congress.

As such, the ruling reestablishes a central concept of the American founding: vetoes for everybody. Under the Constitution, government is limited to certain enumerated powers, and no government action can go into effect unless every part of the polity agrees on it. The document established a republic in which democracy is limited to the protection of individual rights: a single majority in a single branch or level of government cannot rule.

The Court’s Slaughter decision is exceedingly appropriate for this 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, as it finally reverses subsequent generations’ undermining of the central strategy behind the construction of the nation’s government.

The decision overturns the Court’s longstanding precedent established in its 1935 ruling in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which established rule by federal agencies and created the deep state. In that decision, the Court ruled that a president could not remove an official from an ostensibly independent agency exercising regulatory power if the governing statute contains a “for cause” provision.

The word “ruled” is especially apt. The Constitution does not give the courts any say over the president’s management of the executive branch, despite many decades of bad court decisions that did exactly that.

As the majority decision states, “The Constitution vests ‘[t]he executive Power’ in a ‘President of the United States of America’ and instructs that he ‘take Care that the Laws be........

© Townhall