Overview
- Conservative justices questioned the 1935 Humphrey’s Executor precedent and indicated openness to narrowing or overruling it.
- Solicitor General D. John Sauer urged the court to scrap for-cause protections, and Chief Justice John Roberts called Humphrey’s a “dried husk.”
- Liberal justices warned that expanding presidential removal power would concentrate authority and erode Congress’s design of independent bodies.
- The court has let Trump’s March firing of FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter take effect pending appeal after lower courts ordered her reinstated.
- A related case over Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook’s removal will be argued in January as the court weighs whether reinstatement is ever an available remedy.