Trump is making elections matter again. For decades there was little change in Washington regardless of who was in office. Washington had become a bloated bureaucracy where it almost impossible to remove anyone no matter how incompetent they might be or how opposed they were to the current administration policies. When administrations changed, people who were in appointed positions moved over to the bureaucracy and remained there.
PDJT has changed that. On June 29th, in a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court ruled that the President may fire FTC commissioners at will, overruling the 1935 SCOTUS decision in Humphrey’s Executor and holding that the FTC’s for-cause removal protections violate the Constitution’s separation of powers.
What is the effect of this decision? This case was not about Trump versus one FTC commissioner who wanted to keep her job. It was about where in our government is the power of the executive vested. According to Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution that power is vested in the President. This decision restores that power for the first time in over 90 years.
Justice Roberts:
“Our Constitution creates three branches, but only one President. That President is not all-powerful — not by any means. But he is not impotent either. He and he alone is vested with ‘the executive Power’ of the United States.”
“If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, we overrule it.”
Humphrey’s Executor from 1935 had created a permanent ruling class — credentialed, insulated, and effectively unfireable (a Deep State if you like)— running the country while elections serve as a ceremonial change of figureheads. This was part of the movement a hundred years ago to have “experts” running the country. Should experts who are insulated from the voting public and who wield considerable coercive power be unaccountable?
Our Constitution’s Article 2, Section 1 says “No.” There must be accountability. And that accountability lies within the Executive branch. Once again the brilliance of our founding fathers is there for everyone to see.
The Founders built a system where you can trace responsibility. Congress writes laws. Courts interpret and apply them. The President executes them. And because the President is a single person elected by the whole nation, accountability is direct: if the executive branch governs badly, the people can remove its head. This means that the head must have the power to remove people who do not work for the country the way the President believes is right.
This case in the Supreme Court has restored that power.
How else has Trump helped to make elections matter? Universal injunctions.
No branch of the government should be imperial in nature or action. That includes the judiciary. Single local Democrat judges have issued more of these nationwide, or universal, injunctions against President Trump than against all other Presidents combined. This isn’t judicial review: it’s pure partisanship. In effect, it’s an effort to overturn the outcome of an election. Some might call that a coup.
In Trump v CASA, Trump ended this nationwide injunction abuse. In this case, the Supreme Court sharply limited nationwide injunctions. In restricting that unconstitutional power, the Court kneecapped the Black Robe Bureaucracy’s favorite tool of unlawful judicial supremacy.
The question was “Is the judiciary supreme over the elected branches?” For years, radical Democrat judges have transformed the judiciary into a weapon of mass obstruction, deploying nationwide injunctions to paralyze the executive branch and nullify the executive authority of the Presidency. Of course, these were left-leaning judges blocking Republican Presidents’ actions when such actions ran counter to the Left’s agenda.
These injunctions — legal orders issued by a single local district judge that block federal policies from being enforced anywhere across the country — are an innovation of the modern left, a judicial coup designed to neutralize Republican administrations so that they cannot govern.
Trump, through this case, has ended this unconstitutional effort by rogue judges. This was an effort by Democrats to maintain their control over the country no matter what the voters have to say.
Does this mean that Trump is now a king? Far from it. SCOTUS made clear that it — the only court with actual nationwide jurisdiction — retains the ability to enjoin actual abuses by the Administration. “After today’s decision, that order of operations will not change,” Kavanaugh wrote in his concurring opinion. “In justiciable cases, this Court, not the district courts or courts of appeals, will often still be the ultimate decisionmaker as to the interim legal status of major new federal statutes and executive actions — that is, the interim legal status for the several-year period before a final decision on the merits.”
This decision actually restores the rule of law. The courts were never meant to be some kind of super-legislature. But that is what they had become. Democrats discovered they could paralyze Republican presidents by funneling lawsuits through handpicked activist judges who will reliably issue sweeping, now clearly illegal injunctions freezing executive actions.
Trump is now empowered to pursue the policies he was elected on. That is how our system of government is supposed to work.