The U.S. Supreme Court made a couple of big decisions today. They said President Donald Trump could not fire Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook for certain reasons, but then they also said a U.S. president does have the power to fire the heads of independent agencies, overturning a Supreme Court decision in place since 1935 (yes, for 91 years). This NBC article, and I’m sure many others, explains the details of the decisions a bit more, but I want to focus on what this actually means. Certain independent agencies were set up by Congress to be free from the constant swinging of partisan politics. They were meant to have a more stable, predictable, independent effect on U.S. society. Such agencies include: Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) & Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) Rather than doing their best to perform their duties and implement their agencies’ directives without worrying about political influence, the heads of these agencies are now at the mercy of whatever the president wants. By default, this means there’s less long-term stability in what these agencies manage. That’s just a fact. If a president doesn’t like something an agency is going, he or she can fire the head(s) of the agency until it changes course. That could concern consumer product safety matters, management of nuclear facilities, power system policies and decisions from FERC, decisions regarding corporate mergers from the FTC, and more. The U.S. is already much less stable in its policies and governance than many (or most?) other countries, including China especially. This could make it even much more so. Lack of long-term consistency and stability, of course, is not good for the business community. It makes it much harder to plan and trust investment decisions. Whether this affects conservative or progressive priorities more, what is certain is that there’s much more risk of flip flopping and corrupt political interference. Practically speaking, President Trump has been known to act outside of previous norms or even laws (as evidenced by numerous Supreme Court decisions to block his actions), and if he hesitates at all to act based on personal preferences, alliances, or interests, it’s certainly much less so than previous presidents. Hence these cases even coming up and making their way to the Supreme Court. So, we can assume he will decide to use this power to influence these “independent” agencies and may well fire people it wasn’t previously legal for a president to fire. How that affects U.S. society, we are yet to see. Going forward, what if a Democratic president coms into power? In recent years, Democrats have show much less willingness to make one-sided political decisions, trying to be more bipartisan and play by the rules. In fact, it has happened repeatedly that Democrats have decided not to make big, power-grabbing decisions when they had to ability to do so, saying that it would go against important political norms, only to see Republicans make those shifts when they gained power. So, if a Democrat gets into the White House but keeps going with this idea to not shake things up and to try to be fair and fairly bipartisan, they will operate like previous presidents have and leave these independent agencies alone. However, if a Democrat gets into the White House and has more of Trump’s kind of approach, deciding to do anything they can possibly do to advance a progressive agenda and constantly pushing boundaries in terms of the law and political norms, well, they could make dramatic changes to the electricity network through FERC, consumer product safety rules, FTC merger approvals, labor rules and regulations, nuclear power plants, employment regulations, etc. Imagine, for example, that Bernie Sanders is elected president. Or Zohran Mamdani. Rather than someone like Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton. Congress has been giving presidents more and more power for a few decades now. We are becoming more and more of a centralized, top-down country in terms of governance. (Let’s just wait to see if Trump decides to try to stay in power and become more of a king or dictator than president.) Now, one of the few ways they created a more decentralized power system, through independent agencies, has been chopped down at the knees. Where we go from here, well, we really don’t know. However, there’s no doubt that overturning a 91-year precedent like this is a big deal and could lead to massive changes in how the country moves forward. Instead of tamping down on an overly politicized period in the country’s history, the Supreme Court just decided to make it much more politicized.
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