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The Supreme Court on Monday backed President Donald Trump’s decision to fire a commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission, sending yet another signal that the high court intends to revisit a 90-year-old court precedent about executive firing power.
The temporary decision to maintain Biden-appointed Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter’s termination was issued 6-3 along ideological lines. The Supreme Court set oral arguments in the case for December.
Trump’s decision to fire Slaughter and another Democrat-appointed commissioner, Alvaro Bedoya, faced legal challenges because it stood in tension with the FTC Act, which says commissioners should only be fired from their seven-year tenures for cause, such as malfeasance.
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Trump fired Slaughter and Bedoya shortly after he took office without citing a cause other than the president’s broad constitutional authority over the executive branch. Bedoya resigned, but Slaughter vowed to fight her firing in court and see the case through to its conclusion.
A lower court initially sided with Slaughter and reinstated her, but she has since been fired and rehired several times as her case made its way to the Supreme Court. Monday’s decision came after the Trump administration asked the high court on an emergency basis to temporarily pause Slaughter’s reinstatement while it considers the merits of the case.
The Supreme Court’s decision to keep Slaughter’s firing intact means she will remain sidelined from the FTC until after the high court hears arguments about the case in December.
The case raises a pivotal question of whether Trump has the ability to fire members of independent agencies as the president pushes for a more unified executive branch. Independent agencies, such as the FTC, various labor boards and the Securities and Exchange Commission, have long been insulated by law from at-will firings.
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Slaughter had argued to the Supreme Court that siding with Trump, even on an interim basis, directly flew in the face of the precedent set in Humphrey’s Executor vs. the United States, which deemed President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s firing of an FTC commissioner unlawful.
Legal experts have speculated that the current conservative-leaning Supreme Court is interested in narrowing or reversing Humphrey’s Executor, which could carry broader implications about a president’s ability to fire members of certain independent agencies.
The three liberal justices dissented and would have denied Trump’s stay request. Writing for the dissent, Justice Elena Kagan speculated that the court’s majority may be “raring” to reverse Humphrey’s Executor. She said, though, that it should not make decisions on the shadow docket that contravene that precedent and instead wait until such a reversal happens.
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“Our emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars,” Kagan wrote. “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.”
Fox News Digital reached out to a representative for Slaughter for comment.
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