Politics Today: News, Analysis & Debate Across the Spectrum
The Supreme Court sent the independent executive branch agency into extinction this week, without even bothering to overturn the precedent that forbids it to do so first.
The right-wing majority allowed President Trump’s firing of the Federal Trade Commission’s Rebecca Slaughter to stand — nearly an identical firing to the one that the Court declared illegal almost a century ago in Humphrey’s Executor.
“The majority, stay order by stay order, has handed full control of all those agencies to the President,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent, citing similar Court orders in response to unlawful firings at the Merit Systems Protection Board, National Labor Relations Board and Consumer Product Safety Commission. “He may now remove — so says the majority, though Congress said differently — any member he wishes, for any reason or no reason at all. And he may thereby extinguish the agencies’ bipartisanship and independence.”
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined her in dissent. The majority was unsigned.
In the Slaughter case, to be argued in December, the Court will squarely address whether Humphrey’s Executor should be overturned — essentially a formality at this point.
“Our emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars,” Kagan wrote. “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.”
Trump asked the Court to cross another Rubicon in his power lust last week, requesting that he be allowed to fire a Federal Reserve governor, long a bright line in preserving the independence of the all-critical central bank. The Court has not yet responded.
Both cases are previews of what’s to come this term: the right-wing justices’ continued sacrifice of congressional power on the altar of the unitary executive.
Pritzker: Trump is Using National Guard to Hijack 2026 Midterms
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) warned in an interview aired Tuesday morning on MSNBC that Trump’s use (or anticipated use) of the National Guard in blue cities is part intimidation, part safety net in case he loses control of Congress in 2026:
“Well, I believe that one of the reasons Donald Trump wants to send troops into American cities is because he wants to be able to take control of the 2026 elections. Remember that back in 2020 he and Michael Flynn, the former general and former– advisor to the president, talked about actually taking control of the ballot boxes in 2020 because they didn’t trust the outcome of the election. Now, if they’ve got troops in cities and it becomes a kind of norm for people, then it won’t be abnormal for them when they’re going to vote having troops at the ballot boxes. He’ll say that he’s protecting the ballot. And if he thinks there’s some kind of fraud, and– what I mean by that is if he thinks that his party isn’t gonna win, then they very well could do what they suggested they were gonna do in 2020, which is take control of the ballot boxes. So I believe that is what this is about. It’s about intimidating people from going to the polls who would not vote for his party and about the ability to take control of the elections if it doesn’t go his way.”
Kimmel Back On The Air (Sort Of)
ABC/Disney announced that it would reinstate Jimmy Kimmel Tuesday night, nominally due to productive conversations with the host, possibly actually due to backlash to his suspension over comments he made following the Charlie Kirk killing.
But hundreds of thousands of households won’t see him back in action.
Sinclair Broadcast Group, a longtime right-wing, partisan force, and Nexstar Media Group, seeking approval from Trump’s FCC for a $6.2 billion merger, will not air the show on the ABC affiliates they own.
“Beginning Tuesday night, Sinclair will be preempting Jimmy Kimmel Live! across our ABC affiliate stations and replacing it with news programming,” said Sinclair in a statement.
Nexstar, ominously, vowed to “monitor” the show upon its return.
It’s a marriage of rabid partisanship and self-serving corruption that has come to define the Trump era.
Man Found Guilty for Trying to Assassinate Trump at His Florida Golf Course
A jury found Ryan Routh guilty on all the charges he faced Tuesday, after he’d pointed a gun through the bushes as Trump golfed at his West Palm Beach country club in September of last year.
He was charged with “attempting to assassinate a major presidential candidate, possessing a firearm in furtherance of a crime of violence, assaulting a federal officer, possessing a firearm and ammunition as a convicted felon and possessing a firearm with an obliterated serial number,” per the Associated Press.
In Case You Missed It
Trump Bails on Negotiations, Tries to Blame Dems for Impending Gov’t Shutdown
‘We Know Better’: Experts Watch in Horror As Trump Admin Hides Record of Right-Wing Violence
Grifter-in-Chief Peddles Snake Oil From White House Podium
Yesterday’s Most Read Story
What We Are Reading
Hundreds of Alligator Alcatraz detainees drop off the grid after leaving site — Miami Herald
How Can We Live Together? Ezra Klein is wrong: shame is essential. — Boston Review
Can Liberalism Be Saved? — New Yorker
Disney Sure Picked an Interesting Week for a Big Streaming Price Hike — Vulture
