Supreme’s leave Federal Watchdog Head in place… Sending the case back to Appeals Court….

In recent years, the Supreme Court has expanded presidential power and made it easier for presidents to remove the leaders of certain independent agencies. In 2020, the court ruled 5-4 that the president can fire the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau without cause. The next year, a unanimous court applied similar reasoning to invalidate restrictions on the president’s ability to oust the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

This past summer, the court’s conservative majority trumpeted its expansive view of presidential power by ruling that Trump and future presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution for actions taken while in office.

Roberts wrote that “unlike anyone else, the president is a branch of government” and needs to be free from the threat of prosecution to exercise those powers forcefully….

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Another look at the long term results if the Supreme’s rul FOR Trump’s expaned power….

It’s worth laying out exactly how some of Trump’s sweeping array of executive actions run up against current constitutional hurdles and how they might be received by the Supreme Court.

First are the firings of high-level officials in the executive branch, including the dismissals of more than a dozen inspectors general, the head of the Office of Special Counsel and members of several different independent agencies whose members cannot be removed under federal law except in limited circumstances.

These moves reflect a particularly aggressive version of the so-called unitary executive theory, a conservative legal theory that posits that the president has the constitutional power to fire officials in the executive branch at will, irrespective of any limitations that Congress has specified in the law. The theory is based on the presidential “vesting clause” in the Constitution, but it cannot be reconciled with the Supreme Court’s 1935 decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which affirmed Congress’ constitutional authority to insulate members of independent agencies like the Federal Trade Commission from at-will removal….

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The second category concerns Trump’s effort to seize Congress’ spending power in order to allow him to unilaterally determine how Americans’ taxpayer dollars are spent, irrespective of what elected officials in Congress may have specified in federal appropriations measures….

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Notably, Trump’s position cannot be reconciled with a decision that the Supreme Court handed down against President Bill Clinton that invalidated even a congressionally authorized line-item veto. The majority in that case, which included Justice Clarence Thomas, observed that there “is no provision in the Constitution that authorizes the President to enact, to amend, or to repeal statutes.” But that, in effect, is the power that Trump has claime..

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A third category, though one that has received much less attention, involves the administration’s effort to increase the federal government’s power over state and local government officials. At the moment, you can slot into this category the Justice Department’s lawsuits against Illinois and New York over so-called sanctuary laws, which, according to the administration’s allegations, impede the federal government’s efforts to deport undocumented immigrants. (You could also argue that the Trump administration’s co-opting of New York City Mayor Eric Adams — giving him an unwarranted reprieve on criminal charges in apparent exchange for his cooperation with the Trump administration’s deportation efforts — ought to fit into this category, though there is likely no judicial remedy for that.)

The Supreme Court has historically looked askance at efforts to “commandeer” state and local governments for federal purposes, particularly given the principle of dual federalism that is reflected in the structure of the Constitution. Every Republican appointee on the court in 2018 affirmed this so-called anticommandeering rule, though it is unclear if the justices will see things in the same way in the immigration context….

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All of this demonstrates the unworkability of the Trump administration’s theories when taken as a whole. There is no question that the volume and intensity of Trump’s efforts to greatly expand his power present the country — and the courts — with a constitutional power grab that has almost no precedent in American history….

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