A (7:36)
All right. First, we have a story from Politico. Billionaires are about to shatter more checks on the federal government. The Supreme Court heard arguments today about whether to finally finish off a teetering 90 year old precedent that limited the president's power over many federal agencies. It's called the separation of powers, and it basically quashes all of Congress's power. But lurking in the wings is a far more radical bid by the Trump administration to remake the federal government from top to bottom by ending the concept of the civil service. Indeed, some legal experts say that is a practical matter. The administration, emboldened by the justices, has already managed to eliminate job protections that have been on the books for nearly 150 years. President Trump's drive to replace agency leaders and his mass firings across the federal government are all based on the same basic legal concept, the unitary executive theory. It holds that every employee of the executive branch is answerable to and fireable at will by the president. The most extreme version of the unitary executive theory holds that the central premise of the civil service, which is the rank and file government employees, shouldn't be hired or fired for political reasons or simply on the president's whim. They say unitary executive theorists say that's unconstitutional because it tramples on the president's power to control the federal government. Quote, it's the logical endpoint to unitary executive theory. That's Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at University of Michigan. I'm Michigan. I'm not sure why I said it that way. Their desired goal would be to arrive at a completely at will workforce. I think the administration is going to push the unitary executive idea as far as it can. And all of the signals it has been getting from the Supreme Court is to push further and push faster. While it's unclear whether the Trump administration will ask the current court to dismantle the federal civil service system, some experts say the justice's deference to Trump in firing related cases is, is kind of egging them on. Quote, this is the real world implication of the path the Supreme Court is On it's not an academic exercise. That's Max Steyer, the Partnership for Public Service. One hopes that they recognize that whatever interest they've had in theory, in practice, they're unleashing an autocracy. And further down that road, the further down the road they go, the worse it will be. It's bad already. Now, this involves Trump's attempt in March to fire Federal Trade Commission member Rebecca Slaughter. That's this case. Trump tapped Slaughter in 2018 to fill a Democratic seat on the FTC. Biden renominated her in 2023 to an additional seven year term. Federal law has long dictated that the FTC commissioners can be fired only for inefficiency, neglect of duty or a malfeasance in office. It's a provision that the supreme court upheld in 1935 in a case challenging Roosevelt's firing of FTC member William Humphrey, hence Humphrey's executor. The ruling, which came to be known as Humphrey's executor, led to similar for cause protections for leaders of independent agencies across the federal and for some of the other posts over the past two decades. The Supreme Court, though, has pared back Humphreys by declaring various sorts of posts to be beyond its reach. These moves have generally tracked with the increasing focus among legal conservatives on the unitary executive theory and on arguments that the Constitution requires that the President have sweeping authority over executive branch personnel. The Court's conservative majority could use this Slaughter case to overrule Humphreys or it could opt for a narrower ruling that the FTC of today has significantly much more regulatory power than it did in 1935. So the precedent simply is no longer applicable. So much for textualists, right? But many believe Humphreys is already all but dead. I'm included in that, Dana. Without issuing definitive rulings, the Justices have let stand almost every Trump firing that has reached them. They've allowed only two fired officials to remain in their jobs. Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook and the Register of Copyrights, Sherra Perlmutter. Now, I think my personal opinion here, Dana, is that the Supreme Court will allow this, you know, any president to fire these members of multi member boards, including Slaughter here at the ftc, including Wilcox and Harris at the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board. But I don't think they're going to let him fire members of the Federal Reserve Board. I think they're going to carve that out.
