Maia Davis
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Maia Davis
@maiadavis.bsky.social
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MSNBC segment producer, formerly NBC News digital, ABC News, Al Jazeera America, the Bergen Record and other places.
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Justice Kagan, dissenting, says the majority will clearly overturn Humphrey's Executor soon—but objects that "our emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars," or to "transfer government authority from Congress to the President."
ay do so again. Under existing law, what Congress said ocs—as this Court unanimously decided nearly a century ago. In Humphrey's Executor v. United States, 295 U.S. 602 (1935), we rejected a claim of presidential prerogative identical to the one made in this case. (Indeed, the suit emerged from a discharge at the very same agency) Con- gress, we held, may restrict the President's power to remove ‘members of the FTC, as well as other agencies performing “quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial” functions, without vio- lating the Constitution. Id., at 629. So the President can- not, as he concededly did here, fire an FTC Commissioner without any reason. To reach a different result requires re- versing the rule stated in Humphrey's: It entails overriding rather than accepting Congress's judgment about agency design. The majority may be raring to take that action, as its grant of certiorari before judgment suggests. But until the deed is done, Humphrey's controls, and prevents the ‘majority from giving the President the unlimited removal power Congress denied him. Because the majority's stay does just that, I respectfully dissent. Our emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars. Still more, it should not be used, as it also has been, to transfer government authority from Congress to the President, and thus to reshape the Nation's separation of powers.
September 22, 2025 at 7:18 PM