Trump’s quest for untrammeled power just got a big boost

The Supreme Court knew one of its new rulings could endanger democracy — and did it anyway.

Just what President Donald Trump needed: more unchecked power.

In the Supreme Court’s new Trump vs. Slaughter opinion, the court ruled that the president’s firing of the Federal Trade Commission’s Rebecca Slaughter was lawful — even though he did not follow Congress’s explicit requirement that FTC commissioners might only be dismissed “for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” In the court’s eyes, such requirements are themselves unconstitutional interference with the president’s Article 2 powers.

The decision was the latest and most sweeping embrace of the “unitary executive” theory, a longstanding concept popular in conservative legal circles that the president should have broad authority to fire any leader of any executive agency for any reason.

The Supreme Court just made Trump the most powerful president in generations

Slaughter could not have been timed worse. Congress gave these agencies broad powers on the explicit theory that they’d be insulated from White House influence. Now the court has decided Trump, of all people, should become the first president to have unquestioned authority over them.

In doing so, they’re playing with fire. Both in the United States and around the world, independent agencies have proven to be an important bulwark protecting free societies from would-be authoritarians. The specific, arbitrary, and politicized way the court is assailing them raises the risks even further.

The immediate threat of politicization

The majority in Slaughter paints executive agencies as a kind of extra-constitutional outgrowth that violates the founding vision of a branch fully controlled by the president. In his concurrence, Justice Neil Gorsuch pins the blame on President Woodrow Wilson — who, in Gorsuch’s estimation, aimed to replace the constitutional system of popular sovereignty with a kind of rule-by-unaccountable-expert. Executive agencies were the means to this nefarious end.

“As Wilson put it, the Nation’s traditional commitment to ‘popular sovereignty’ entrusted too much to a ‘selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish’ people. And letting the public anywhere near the new bureaucracies would amount to letting ‘a rustic handl[e] delicate machinery,’” Gorsuch writes.

These historical claims are extremely debatable (see Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent for the response). But in the hundred-plus years since Wilson’s presidency, independent regulatory agencies have become common — both in the United States and globally. On a practical level, we know a lot more about how they work, and their relationship with democracy, than Wilson did in his day.

And what we’ve found is that independent agencies are in fact quite compatible with democratic governance. They are in common use across the democratic world, existing across the OECD countries. Research finds that countries with stronger........

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