Welcome to the era of Slaughter

Spare a moment to think of Rebecca Slaughter. She was not just fired under Trump as head of the Federal Trade Commission; she will now give her name to a precedent that tears at the notion of an independent and expert public service she once represented.

There is no way to interpret the Slaughter decision as anything other than a defeat for expert, independent government, and the power of Congress to enable such government. Trump made clear that he saw it as a monumental victory handed to him by the Roberts Court.

The ruling allows Trump to remove independent agency heads. This is consequential for regulatory agencies in particular, and the promise that such regulators will be somewhat independent of the President of the day, and by extension, the corporations/donors they oversee.

The decision was expected based on prior court actions and oral arguments, especially when Chief Justice Roberts refer to Humhprey’s Executor precedent that supporting independent agencies as a “dried husk.” That does not make its impact any less breathtaking.

It is also a measure of how degraded our expectations of the Supreme Court are, and how complicit it is in Trump’s project of democratic backsliding: we are unsurprised when the Supreme Court drops a 90 year old precedent and overturns legislation to at the behest of a President who denies democratic outcomes.

At no point did Trump make any effort to justify the firings. I do think this bears mentioning because the magical thinking behind unitary executive theory implies some governing logic behind it — that Trump is an nationally elected official, and therefore most responsive to the will and interests of the people. The reality is that Trump is a deeply unpopular president whose purges are broadly disliked and whose attack on regulatory agencies will serve donors, not the public. But reality must not intrude on SOCTUS reasoning.

Sotomayor’s dissent laid out the risks for governing:

Today, the majority replaces 90 years of p…