In a 6-3 bombshell in Trump v. Slaughter issued on Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court's GOP-appointed justices ruled that President Donald Trump is well within his right to fire members of independent agencies — including former Federal Trade Commission (FTC) commissioner Rebecca Slaughter — and overturned the 1935 SCOTUS precedent in Humphrey's Executor v. United States. Trump loyalists are applauding the decision, but not everyone on the right is happy with it.
Journalist Andrew Egger, in the conservative website The Bulwark, argues that the High Court's Trump v. Slaughter ruling could be terrible for conservatives in the long run.
"Many Trump foes have come to view this Court as a doormat for the president," Egger explains. "This is dramatically overtorqued: The Court hasn't been afraid to cross Trump on some of his biggest priorities, from the 2020 election to his signature 'Liberation Day' tariffs to his mass deportation regime. Just yesterday, in a separate case, SCOTUS dealt Trump a major loss on the issue of mail-in ballots, ruling that he could not prevent states from accepting ballots postmarked by Election Day where that practice is consistent with their laws. But there's no question that this conservative Court has one ideological priority that aligns perfectly with Trump's own."
Egger continues, "They see the independent agency structure — in which Congress impanels some regulatory body, gives them broad policy-setting and enforcement authorities, and insulates them from political accountability by setting up mechanisms that make their members difficult to fire — as inherently dubious under the Constitution. Their decision in Slaughter yesterday, which greenlights Trump's firing of a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, is the culmination of this view."
Back in 1935, it was conservative Republicans who applauded the Humphrey's Executor precedent — as they believed that liberal President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with his New Deal, was doing too much too quickly. But in 2026, many MAGA Republicans are pushing the "unitary executive theory," which favors a very strong and powerful executive branch.
According to Egger, Trump is too "shortsighted" to realize that the High Court's Trump v. Slaughter ruling could hurt conservatives down the line.
"Trump continues to show remarkable disdain for the sausage-making and horse-trading of the legislative process; just yesterday, he dismissed his own administration's housing bill as 'a yawn,'" Egger writes. "But after he leaves office, his laws will be all he can count on remaining. Yes, the Supreme Court has made it easier for Trump to remake the government in his image for now. But they've done just as much to make it easier for the next Democratic president to blot out that image once he's gone."
