The Supreme Court's conservative majority voted 6-3 Monday to overturn a landmark 1935 ruling that limited presidential authority over independent agencies. The decision overturned Humphrey's Executor, a precedent protecting Federal Trade Commission members from arbitrary removal. The Trump v. Slaughter case centered on President Donald Trump's March 2025 firing of Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, the agency's last Democratic member, citing inconsistency with administration priorities. Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissent contended the ruling suggested, "all three branches of Government have been acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time." In a separate case, the court ruled 5-4, declaring Trump lacked the authority to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, creating divergent outcomes authored by Chief Justice John Roberts. Legal experts criticized the contradictory decisions, with commentators noting the rulings appear to protect financial institutions while exposing consumer protection agencies to executive removal."There's no sugar-coating Slaughter," wrote Georgetown law professor Steve Vladek. "It's an enormously important ruling (far more important than the other three decisions #SCOTUS handed down today). It's a huge win for Trump/the executive. And it's going to have massive ramifications for the functioning of the government long after Trump is gone."Watch the video. Your browser does not support the video tag.
CNN special correspondent Jamie Gangel didn't sugarcoat President Donald Trump's Supreme Court setback, tracing it straight back to his refusal to accept the 2020 election.The court ruled 5-4 Monday in Watson v. Republican National Committee that states may count mail ballots postmarked by Election Day even if they arrive afterward, rejecting an RNC challenge Trump's Justice Department had backed. Trump called it a "tremendous loss."Gangel agreed it was a loss, but said Trump brought it on himself."So, is this a loss for President Trump? Yes," she said. "But big picture, he's obsessed with this. It is sort of a loss of his own making, because the underlying problem here is he doesn't want to admit he lost in 2020, so he's looking for fraud and corruption where there isn't."She noted the practice isn't partisan — Trump himself has voted by mail — and said it's "not about corruption or fraud."Gangel said his fixation is holding up a major bipartisan housing bill aimed at reining in costs, which she said had reached his desk, but that he won't sign it because he's so focused on curbing mail voting and passing his stalled election overhaul, the SAVE Act.In the Oval Office moments earlier, Trump said the housing bill "hasn't been sent to me yet" but was "coming." Next to his voting bill, he said, "just about everything is a big yawn."The decision set off fury among MAGA allies and came as the justices also turned away his E. Jean Carroll appeal.Former Trump aide Hogan Gidley pushed back, calling the housing measure "a political win" the president would "take a victory lap" on.
Today, Bloomberg's Mike McKee and June Grasso break down the Supreme Court's decision to allow Fed governor Lisa Cook to stay in her role while she fights President Trump's efforts to oust her. Then, former Governor of Indiana Eric Holcomb discusses RAISE US, a joint effort with former Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo that aims to develop a strategy around AI's impact on the labor market. Plus, Kikoff CEO Cynthia Chen, breaks down how her app helps consumers build credit and improve low credit scores. (Source: Bloomberg)
The Supreme Court blocked President Trump’s attempt to remove Fed Governor Lisa Cook for now while expanding his power to fire other officials. What this means for the Fed and others, on the Big Take podcast.
The Supreme Court blocked Trump’s bid to remove the Fed’s Lisa Cook for now but expanded his power over other agencies. Hear what the rulings mean for the Fed’s future on the Big Take podcast. (Source: Bloomberg)
A Constitutional law expert slammed a GOP pundit's "absolutely ridiculous" analogy about the Supreme Court's decision to overturn more than nine decades of precedent on presidential power. On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Trump v. Slaughter that President Donald Trump has the authority to fire members of the previously independent Federal Trade Commission. The decision overturned a precedent known as Humphrey's Executor, which had stood for more than 91 years, and prevented the president from firing employees of independent government agencies. Trump celebrated the opinion in a post on Truth Social, saying it "greatly increased presidential power at a time when it is needed most." Hogan Gidley, a senior advisor to the America First Policy Institute, argued on CNN's "The Arena" with host Kasie Hunt that the Supreme Court was right to rule that Trump has a right to fire people, just like a new head football coach is allowed to bring in a coaching staff of their choice. Michele Goodwin, a Constitutional law professor at Georgetown Law, replied that the analogy, if applied by the Trump administration, "should cause all of us to worry about the reach of the decision.""Let's be clear. We just experienced a global pandemic, and during that pandemic, we had a president who suggested that if people looked at the sun and just drank bleach, bathed in bleach, or something along those lines, COVID might not reach them," Goodwin said. "That was absolutely ridiculous." "This is exactly why you need experts who are learned and in agencies, and it is why they need an arms-length distance not only from the President, but also from Congress and the Supreme Court, to be able to do the work," she added.
Court sides against Republicans after deciding earlier this term to let Louisiana effectively dismantle Voting Rights ActUS supreme court decisions – live updatesSign up for the Breaking News US newsletter emailThe US supreme court sided against national Republicans and Donald Trump’s administration to allow mail-in ballots that arrive after election day to be counted, upholding the law in more than a dozen states.The Republican National Committee (RNC) had challenged a Mississippi state law allowing mailed ballots to be counted if they arrive within five business days of election day, so long as they were postmarked by election day.This article was amended on 29 June 2026 to correct some misspelled names Continue reading...
There was good news and bad news from the Supreme Court on Monday. We’ll start with the former. In an extraordinary 5-4 ruling in Trump v. Cook, the court held that President Donald Trump cannot summarily fire a Federal Reserve governor without cause, thereby shielding the nation’s central bank from direct presidential control.Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote for the court, held that Congress could lawfully shield Federal Reserve members from removal without cause because of the Fed’s unique role in American governance. In doing so, he and the other justices in the majority—Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the court’s three liberal members—sidestepped some of the court’s normal procedural hurdles.“We see no reason to leave the public in limbo, or to sow doubt as to the status of one of our nation’s (and the world’s) most important financial institutions,” he explained in his majority opinion, quoting from precedent. “Although we appreciate that others may see matters differently, we would not so quickly unsettle this ‘special arrangement sanctioned by history.’”Unfortunately, the court’s deference to Congress on removal protections applies only to the Federal Reserve. The court’s conservative majority simultaneously held that Trump could fire Democratic appointees at the Federal Trade Commission in Trump v. Slaughter, clearing the path for him to wield much greater influence over other financial regulatory agencies.The 6-3 decision is a generational victory for the conservative legal movement, which has spent the last few decades trying to bring independent federal agencies under the heel of Republican presidents. The high court also overturned a New Deal-era precedent that allowed Congress to protect the leaders of federal financial regulators from dismissal without cause in Slaughter. In doing so, it opened some of the nation’s most important governing institutions to the day-to-day whims of a corrupt president.Taken together, Cook and Slaughter divided the Supreme Court into three camps. One of them, represented by the court’s three liberal justices, would have upheld the status quo for independent federal agencies. In their view, Congress can give certain federal agencies a measure of independence from the White House by only allowing the president to fire the agencies’ leaders for cause.This also happened to be the status quo for at least the last century of American history. In 1935, the Supreme Court ruled in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States that the president could not lawfully remove a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission except for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” Prior to Slaughter, no president had sought to dismiss a FTC commissioner, either for cause or without it.While presidents have the power to remove executive-branch officers by default, the Humphrey’s Executor court reasoned, Congress could impose limits if the agency in question also exercised “quasi-legislative” or “quasi-judicial” power. Agency independence became particularly important with financial regulators as a check on corruption and safeguard of public confidence.“Congress and more than a dozen Presidents have relied on Humphrey’s to construct a workable government, creating many other agencies in the FTC’s tradition,” Sotomayor explained in her Cook dissent, which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “Today, this Court undoes centuries of political practice and concludes that all three branches of government have been acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time. Its conclusion is wrong.”Last year, Trump began to challenge Humphrey’s Executor by firing the heads of certain federal agencies without cause. The president had long sought to exercise more direct control over federal agencies, though he lacked the interest or drive to do so during his first term. After his return to power last year, Trump ended the Justice Department’s post-Watergate tradition of independence, staffed other agencies with personal loyalists, and sought to remove Democratic appointees of multi-member regulatory agencies.The Supreme Court proved eager to help him wage this war against what conservatives had long derided as the “administrative state.” The justices effectively signaled that Humphrey’s Executor was a dead letter in a shadow-docket ruling in Wilcox v. Trump. (The court also addressed the Federal Reserve in that case, but we’ll come back to that later.)Technically, however, that ruling remained the law of the land when Trump dismissed FTC commissioner Rebecca Slaughter last year. Slaughter challenged her dismissal in federal court, noting that Congress had insulated commissioners like herself from presidential removal without cause and that Humphrey’s Executor remained good law.
