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The Supreme Court intervened in September, granting the Trump administration’s request to halt the lower court’s order. That left Slaughter out of the FTC while the case advanced—and set the stage for Monday’s explosive showdown.
What followed during oral arguments was nothing short of breathtaking. For over two hours, the justices wrestled with the future of the administrative state itself. Yet it was Justice Jackson’s sweeping defense of government technocrats that turned heads. She launched into what some observers called a “No Kings” tirade, insisting that vast chunks of the federal government—transportation, economics, banking, regulatory boards—must operate outside presidential oversight.
She even went so far as to claim that empowering the President to remove these officials would usher the nation toward monarchy. According to Jackson, the President should not control essential decision-making bodies across Washington:
• Transportation authorities
• Economic regulatory agencies
• The Federal Reserve
• Multimember commission boards
• Entire segments of federal policy
Her remarks reached a peak when she tried to portray bureaucratic independence as a constitutional safeguard instead of a direct threat to democratic accountability. Justice Jackson declared:
“That some issues, some matters, some areas should be handled in this way by non-partisan experts; that Congress is saying that expertise matters with respect to aspects of the economy and transportation and the various independent agencies that we have. So having a President come in and fire all the scientists, and the doctors, and the economists, and the PhDs, and replace them with loyalists and people who don’t know anything, is actually not in the best interest of the citizens of the United States. These issues should not be in presidential control. Can you speak to me about the danger of allowing, in these various areas, the President to actually control the Transportation Board and potentially the Federal Reserve and all these other independent agencies? In these particular areas, we would like to have independence. We… we don’t want the President controlling. I guess what I don’t understand from your overarching argument is why that determination of Congress—which makes perfect sense given its duty to protect the people of the United States—why that is subjugated to a concern about the President not being able to control everything. I appreciate there’s a conflict between the two, but one would think, under our constitutional design, given the history of the monarchy and the concerns the Framers had about a President controlling everything, that in the clash between those two, Congress’s view—that we should be able to have independence with respect to certain issues—should take precedence.”
WATCH:
Her comments painted a picture of federal agencies as sacred temples of expertise rather than bodies accountable to the voters who choose the nation’s leader.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh fired back with a scenario that sliced directly into Jackson’s argument. What happens, he asked, when a president inherits a bureaucracy intentionally stacked to frustrate his agenda? His hypothetical cut to the core of the administrative state’s unchecked power. Justice Kavanaugh asked:
“I want to give you a chance to deal with the hard hypothetical. When both Houses of Congress and the President are controlled by the same party, they create a lot of these independent agencies or extend some of the current independent agencies into these kinds of situations so as to thwart future Presidents of the opposite party.”
WATCH:
Kavanaugh’s question exposed the real danger: a government where elections don’t matter because unelected officials hold the true reins of power.
As the Court deliberates, one thing is clear: Trump v. Slaughter isn’t just about the FTC. It’s about who runs the country—the President elected by the people, or entrenched bureaucrats who answer to no one.
