The Supreme Court on Monday allowed President Donald Trump to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission without cause as the high court inches toward revisiting a landmark ruling about executive power over terminations.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a brief order that Biden-appointed FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter should remain terminated from her job, at least for the next week, while the Supreme Court continues to consider her case.
The high court’s order responding to an emergency petition from the Trump administration comes as Slaughter has faced whiplash in the courts while challenging Trump’s decision to fire her at will.
A district court reinstated Slaughter, and then through the appeals process, Slaughter was re-fired, re-hired, and then re-fired once again on Monday. After an appellate court allowed her to return to work on Sept. 2, she did so right away, even sharing on social media multiple dissents she has authored in the days since her return.
Fox News Digital reached out to Slaughter’s legal team for comment.
Trump’s decision to fire Slaughter and the other Democrat-appointed commissioner, Alvaro Bedoya, stood in tension with the FTC Act, which says commissioners should only be fired from their seven-year tenures for cause, such as malfeasance.
Their firings are at odds with a 90-year-old Supreme Court ruling in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which found that President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s firing of an FTC commissioner was illegal.
While the Supreme Court has let Trump’s firings at other independent agencies proceed temporarily while the lawsuits play out in the lower courts, Slaughter’s case has presented the most blatant question yet to the justices about whether they plan to overturn Humphrey’s Executor. Legal scholars have speculated that the current conservative-leaning Supreme Court has an appetite to reverse or narrow that decision.
Solicitor General John Sauer argued to the high court that the FTC wielded significant executive power and that its authority had expanded since the 1930s, when Humphrey’s Executor first established that an at-will FTC firing was illegal. The FTC now enforces dozens of statutes, including the Sherman Act, and has power to bring lawsuits seeking injunctions and penalties, Sauer noted.
‘Contrary to the lower courts’ suggestion, Humphrey’s Executor does not mean that Article II permits tenure protections for any agency named the ‘Federal Trade Commission,’ no matter how much more executive power the FTC accumulates,’ Sauer said.
