{"id":525,"date":"2026-06-29T19:07:54","date_gmt":"2026-06-29T19:07:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=525"},"modified":"2026-06-29T19:07:54","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T19:07:54","slug":"the-supreme-court-just-made-trump-the-most-powerful-president-in-generations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=525","title":{"rendered":"The Supreme Court just made Trump the most powerful president in generations"},"content":{"rendered":"
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, one of two \u201cunitary executive\u201d cases that the Supreme Court handed down on Monday, is the culmination of a nearly 40-year fight by Republican judges to expand the powers of the presidency. It transforms President Donald Trump into the most powerful figure to govern the United States in generations.<\/p>\n

Read more A fringe attack on voting rights just got four votes on the Supreme Court<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The central issue in Slaughter<\/em> is whether Congress may create \u201cindependent\u201d federal agencies, which are led by a board of people appointed by the president, but who cannot be removed by the president except for neglect, malfeasance, or some other cause other than the fact that the president wants to replace them with people who are more loyal to his agenda.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Supreme Court endorsed these independent agencies in Humphrey\u2019s Executor v. United States<\/em> (1935), and Congress has created many such agencies since then. Slaughter <\/em>concerned the same agency that was at issue in Humphrey\u2019s Executor<\/em>, the Federal Trade Commission, whose leaders have enjoyed some protection from presidential firing since it was created in 1914.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Slaughter<\/em> overrules Humphrey\u2019s Executor<\/em>, and eliminates nearly all of Congress\u2019s more-than-a-century-old power to create agencies that may act with some independence from the president. But it\u2019s worth noting that the decision was handed down alongside , which strongly suggests that members of the Federal Reserve remain independent from the president.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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While independent agencies have existed for more than a century, Republican judges have wanted to eliminate them for a very long time. In 1988, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a lonely dissent, in Morrison v. Olson<\/em>, that touted a theory known as the \u201cunitary executive.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Constitution, Scalia wrote, provides that \u201cthe executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States.\u201d This, according to Scalia, meant that no one in the federal government could wield power that is \u201cexecutive\u201d in nature unless that official is fully controlled by the president. The Constitution, Scalia concluded with a flourish, does not say that \u201csome<\/em> of the executive power, but all<\/em> of the executive power\u201d belongs to the president and the president alone.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Chief Justice John Roberts\u2019s majority opinion in Slaughter<\/em>, which is joined in part or in full by all of his Republican colleagues, tracks Scalia\u2019s position. It holds that agency leaders who wield power that \u201cfall well within the heartland of executive power\u201d must be fireable at will by the president.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Nothing about this decision will surprise anyone who has paid attention to the Court\u2019s past two decades of decisions. The Court\u2019s Republican majority started signaling that Humphrey\u2019s Executor <\/em>was doomed as recently as 2009. The unitary executive played a starring role in (2024), the Republican justices\u2019 decision holding that Trump is allowed to use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes. And the Court previously ruled against Rebecca Slaughter, the FTC commissioner who sued after Trump fired her, in a .<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But Slaughter<\/em> does complete a project that the Republican justices have strived to complete for their entire time on the nation\u2019s highest Court. And it gives Trump powers that no president has enjoyed for about a century.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Republican justices are a little too certain they know what \u201cexecutive\u201d power is<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Broadly speaking, the unitary executive theory contains two propositions. One is that all \u201cexecutive\u201d power, whatever that means, belongs to the president. The second is that certain governmental functions are definitively \u201cexecutive\u201d in nature.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The first of these two propositions is the most defensible. The Constitution does say that \u201cthe executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States.\u201d So that does suggest that there is something called the \u201cexecutive Power\u201d that belongs to a single person.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But the Court\u2019s Republicans have often made very bold claims about what qualifies as \u201cexecutive\u201d that are not supported by history. Most egregiously, in the Trump<\/em> immunity decision, the Republican justices did not simply hold that Trump may commit crimes; they held that he may order the Justice Department to target his enemies even if these investigations are \u201cshams\u201d conducted \u201cfor an improper purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Why you grieve the end of summer before it\u2019s even over<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Republican justices reasoned that the power to investigate and prosecute crimes is \u201cthe special province of the Executive Branch,\u201d and thus belongs entirely to the president \u2014 even if he wields this power unlawfully.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Historically, however, federal judges often had the power to appoint prosecutors \u2014 a power that they retain under limited circumstances today. And many historians believe that around the time of the Constitution\u2019s framing, private attorneys, and not government employees within the executive branch, were primarily responsible for prosecuting crimes. So Trump<\/em>\u2019s claim that the power to prosecute belongs entirely to the executive is anachronistic.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Slaughter<\/em> rests on a similar argument, saying that the FTC, the formerly independent agency at issue in that case, \u201cenforces and administers some 80 statutes\u201d and thus must be thought of as an \u201cexecutive\u201d agency. Roberts points, for example, to the fact that the FTC investigates private companies that have allegedly violated certain laws, and \u201cfiles suits\u201d against these companies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It should be obvious that many federal statutes are enforced by private lawyers who file suits against private companies on their clients\u2019 behalf. But that doesn\u2019t mean that those private lawyers are subordinate to the president.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The unitary executive theory, in other words, seizes upon a vague line in the Constitution which indicates that some undefined powers belong to the president, and uses that vague line to give very specific powers to Trump. That\u2019s hard to justify as a matter of text and history. But it is still a project that the Republican Party\u2019s judges have been committed to for a very long time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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At least some of the Republican justices believe that the Federal Reserve is special<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Almost immediately after the Court handed down Slaughter<\/em>, it also handed down Cook<\/em>, which allows Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve\u2019s Board of Governors who Trump attempted to fire after bringing sham allegations against her \u2014 to remain in her job.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Court previously suggested that members of the Federal Reserve are immune to the unitary executive because \u201cthe Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.\u201d But it did not explain what this sentence means or why it justifies an exemption to the rule governing agencies like the FTC.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Cook<\/em> does little to flesh out this vague sentence, although Roberts\u2019s opinion in Cook<\/em> does spend some time arguing that the idea that there should be a national bank that is somewhat independent of political actors precedes the Constitution itself.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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There are, however, powerful policy reasons why the Fed should be independent. Among other things, the Fed has the power to temporarily stimulate the economy in ways that will cause turmoil and high inflation years down the road. So, if the president controls the Fed, he can order it to lower interest rates and send a flood of cheap money to borrowers, injecting cocaine into the US economy during an election year, knowing that the bill is unlikely to come due until the president leaves office \u2014 or at least until after the election takes place.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That appears to be enough to have convinced two Republican justices, Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, to join an opinion letting Cook keep her job for now. But the Cook<\/em> opinion also emphasizes that it is \u201cnarrow,\u201d and it merely holds that Trump had to give Cook a minimal amount of process \u2014 \u201csome explanation of the evidence at issue, some avenue for a response, and a deadline by which a response would be due\u201d \u2014 before he can fire her.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It remains to be seen, in other words, whether the Court is actually committed to Fed independence. For the moment, however \u2014 unlike other independent agency leaders \u2014 Cook gets to keep her job against Trump\u2019s will.<\/p>\n

Read more Should you keep practicing a religion even if you don\u2019t believe?<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

See More:<\/span><\/p>\n
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  • Politics<\/li>\n
  • Supreme Court<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The Republican justices just won a four-decade war against \u201cindependent\u201d federal agencies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":524,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Supreme Court just made Trump the most powerful president in generations - American Living Report<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=525\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Supreme Court just made Trump the most powerful president in generations - American Living Report\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Republican justices just won a four-decade war against \u201cindependent\u201d federal agencies.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=525\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"American Living Report\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-06-29T19:07:54+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=525#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=525\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/7b970e3bc484fe2e26860a4380d70de8\"},\"headline\":\"The Supreme Court just made Trump the most powerful president in generations\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-06-29T19:07:54+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=525\"},\"wordCount\":1368,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=525#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/06\\\/9defdb8ec7595d0b0c6095c7438791b8.webp\",\"articleSection\":[\"Interesting\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=525#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=525\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=525\",\"name\":\"The Supreme Court just made Trump the most powerful president in generations - 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