The Supreme Court on Monday granted presidents wide-ranging authority to fire senior officials over policy differences, but said some limits must be observed.
In a pair of decisions, the justices approved President Trump’s firing of a Federal Trade Commission member whom the White House booted over political differences. But the high court continued to block Mr. Trump’s firing of Rebecca Cook from the Federal Reserve Board, saying he didn’t give her a chance to challenge his justification that she engaged in iffy mortgage behavior.
Taken together, they give the president vast powers to fire people he sees as roadblocks to his agenda, even at so-called independent agencies that Congress had sought to insulate from such presidential meddling. But he has less of a free hand when it comes to firings “for cause.”
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote both opinions, joined by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. The court’s other GOP appointees sided with them in the FTC case, while the Democratic appointees joined with them in the Federal Reserve case.
“The president must have the assistance of officers he can trust,” the chief justice wrote in the FTC case. “Although it is up to the Senate to decide whether to confirm those with whom the president would prefer to work, neither Congress nor the courts may saddle him with those with whom he cannot work.”
In approving the firing of Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic appointee to the FTC, the justices overruled a 91-year-old precedent where the Supreme Court had blocked President Franklin Roosevelt from firing an FTC member.
Mr. Trump’s firing of Ms. Cook at the Federal Reserve didn’t fare as well.
The president had said she was being fired not over political differences but rather for cause. He accused her of malfeasance in a past mortgage application.
Lower courts blocked the firing, allowing Ms. Cook to remain on the job while the case continued.
And the justices said Monday that was the right call.
Chief Justice Roberts said Mr. Trump needed to give Ms. Cook an “opportunity to respond to the charges made against her.”
“To be clear, the ultimate question of whether the president can remove Cook for cause will depend in part on the underlying facts. In this opinion, we have not addressed the facts,” he wrote. “Rather, we have simply addressed the parties’ arguments about the appropriate legal standards under which the facts must be evaluated.”
The court declined to say exactly what that process must look like, but said Trump’s social media post warning her she would be fired didn’t meet that standard.
The cases are the latest to advance the interests of presidential power and the notion that he has free rein to shape the agencies that make up the executive branch.
The key test for the court in the FTC case was whether that agency wielded significant executive power. The court found that it did, and so the president must be able to shape the people who exercise that power on his behalf.
The Federal Reserve, the court said, stands differently.
Chief Justice Roberts said the Fed’s role in setting monetary policy has long set it aside. No less than Alexander Hamilton, who was at the constitutional convention and then served as the first secretary of the Treasury, warned that “suspicion” of political manipulation could undermine monetary policy.
That played out in the establishment of the First Bank of the U.S. and the Second Bank, all during the country’s early days. And the high court said Monday those same principles apply to the Fed, the natural successor to, albeit far more powerful than, those original banks.
The implications of the Federal Reserve ruling remain to be seen.
But the ramifications of the FTC firing are widespread. The ruling gives tacit approval to dozens, if not hundreds, of other Trump firings of Democratic appointees. Those range from the Merit Systems Protection Board to the National Labor Relations Board, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission to the Office of Special Counsel.
Mr. Trump had concluded that his first term was hindered by having too many opponents sitting in key positions within the federal bureaucracy. He came into his second term looking to oust them.
Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, while agreeing with his GOP colleagues that Mr. Trump has wide-ranging firing powers, said the ruling should be a caution to Congress about giving up so much of its power to so-called independent agencies.
The issue came to the high court 91 years ago, in the Humphrey’s Executor case, after President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to fire William Humphrey, a GOP appointee to the FTC who vociferously took positions opposed to the president.
In 1935, the court ruled against Roosevelt, arguing that the FTC’s role wasn’t political or executive.
In the decades since, the justices had chipped away at that decision, but Monday’s ruling officially sent it to the dustbin.
“If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, we overrule it,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “Humphrey’s has for decades been a result in search of a rationale.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, an Obama appointee, led the dissent, saying her colleagues were creating an imperial presidency.
“In holding otherwise, the Court gives the president a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws,” she wrote.
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