The Supreme Court Gave Trump Almost Everything He Wanted
Congress may establish independent agencies “to assist it with its functions,” Roberts claimed, but could not “foist those agencies upon the president, and thus deprive him of the ‘executive power vested [in him] by the Constitution.’” The president-as-victim framework is a defining trait of the unitary executive theory, which often paints the executive branch as an avatar of the popular will that is shackled by a burdensome legislature and a meddlesome court.
Indeed, in Roberts’s opinion in Slaughter, the legislative branch is framed as a disembodied, eldritch force that constantly tries to undermine the executive. “Since its creation in 1914, the FTC has accumulated vast rulemaking, enforcement, and adjudicatory powers under more than 80 statutes,” Roberts noted at one point. One might also describe that as the legislative process. To the conservative majority, however, Congress is treated as some kind of natural force to be endured and resisted, like rust or erosion.
What is actually being washed away is a century of American governance that brought individual prosperity and economic growth, even if Americans did not actively realize it. “Today, the majority replaces 90 years of proven, workable practice with a half-baked theory of executive power that is simultaneously all encompassing yet also subject to necessary but undefined exceptions,” Sotomayor wrote in her Slaughter dissent. “The one thing that does appear to be clear going forward is that chaos will follow.”