Happy Thursday! It’s Associate Editor Audrey Moorehead, here to round out our week of SCOTUS coverage with a look at two major decisions on executive power. Before we get into the issue of the day, though, a lighter note: I’ve been in my home state of Tennessee for the past two weeks to visit family and (as our Subtext subscribers know) attend a college friend’s wedding. It was a great opportunity to catch up with people, as most weddings are, but this one was particularly special because guests with wildly different political views ate, drank and were merry together, forming surprising friendships and even lightheartedly teasing each other on politics without things getting ugly. The night was a reminder of the ways that our humanity unites us even when politics divides us. I like to think that we accomplish something similar here at Tangle.

Alright, enough mushiness! Aside from our main topic, we have a look back at the vote for independence that happened 250 years ago today, as well as the stories we didn’t cover this week. It’s a 14-minute read — enjoy!

How we’re celebrating.

Quick hits.

1. The Trump administration announced it will not renew the U.S.–Mexico–Canada trade agreement, saying it will instead seek to renegotiate key pillars of the deal. (The announcement)
2. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the U.S. economy added 57,000 jobs in June, lower than economists’ expectations. The unemployment rate decreased slightly to 4.2%. (The report)
3. Former Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan sued the Justice Department and Trump administration officials, requesting a court order to preserve records of ongoing federal investigations into him. (The suit)
4. Ukraine struck a major Russian oil refinery for the second time in a week, as well as a Russian plant that produces missile components. (The strikes) 
5. Immigration officials reportedly made approximately 10,000 arrests in the past five days amid an increase in enforcement activity. (The arrests)

Today’s topic.

Two Supreme Court rulings on federal agency independence. On Monday, the Supreme Court issued two decisions on the president’s power to remove leaders of federal agencies. In the first case, Trump v. Slaughter, the Court voted 6–3 to strike down a federal law that limited the president’s power to fire Federal Trade Commission (FTC) members. In the second, Trump v. Cook, the Court voted 5–4 that Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook can remain in her role while her legal challenge to President Trump’s attempt to fire her plays out. 

The Slaughter case: In March 2025, President Trump fired FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, stating her continued presence would be “inconsistent with my Administration’s priorities.” Slaughter, one of two Democratic commissioners on the bipartisan consumer-protection board at the time, was nominated by Trump in 2018 and renominated by President Joe Biden in 2023. Slaughter challenged her firing, citing a law that states commissioners can only be removed for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” A district court ruled in her favor and ordered her reinstated; a panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to block the reinstatement. In September, the Supreme Court allowed Trump to remove Slaughter while considering the case.

The majority’s decision struck down the statute that Slaughter cited, overruling the Court’s previous finding in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935) that upheld the law. “Although it is up to the Senate to decide whether to confirm those with whom the President would prefer to work, neither Congress nor the courts may saddle him with those with whom he cannot work,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote.

The Court’s three Democratic-appointed justices dissented. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the case “should have begun and ended with” Humphrey’s Executor, adding, “Today, the majority places accountability to the President above all else.”

The Cook case: In August 2025, Trump ordered the removal of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, who was originally appointed by Biden in 2022 to serve on the Federal Reserve’s seven-person board of governors. Trump stated he was firing Cook “for cause” due to alleged mortgage fraud; Cook denied wrongdoing and challenged her firing in court. In September, U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb found that while the Federal Reserve Act contains the “for cause” provision, it only covers a governor’s behavior in office. Judge Cobb issued an order allowing Cook to remain in office while litigation continued, and a panel of the D.C. Circuit upheld the order. The Trump administration then asked the Supreme Court to intervene, and the justices heard oral arguments in January. 

The majority decision, penned by Chief Justice Roberts and joined by Justices Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, read, “Congress limited the President’s power to remove Governors for good reason — ‘[t]o preserve the independence of the Federal Reserve’ and to continue the ‘long tradition’ of ‘monetary policy… exercised independent of… executive influence.’”

Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett dissented alone, and Justice Samuel Alito’s dissent was joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch. Barrett argued that the majority was erroneously carving out a special exception for the Federal Reserve. “The Court’s holding is in serious tension with Trump v. Slaughter, which we also decide today,” she wrote. 

Below, we’ll get into what the left and right are saying about these two agency rulings. Then, Associate Editor Audrey Moorehead’s take. 

What the left is saying.

• The left opposes the Slaughter decision, and many say its rationale is inconsistent with its decision in Cook. 
• Some suggest the Court actually did little to protect Fed officials. 
• Others argue the majority erred in overturning Humphrey’s Executor. 

In The American Prospect, David Dayen called Slaughter and Cook “impossible to reconcile.”

“Much of what you need to know about who rules America can be found in two Supreme Court opinions released today. They reinforce how the law as interpreted by this Court is malleable depending on whom it’s applied to,” Dayen wrote. “If you work in the executive branch, you can now be fired by the president for whatever reason or no reason at all… even if the law creating the agency said you needed a reason. This new standard overturns 91 years of precedent and is now the law, in every case — except if the agency you work for is the Federal Reserve.”

“None of these independent agencies will ever operate the same way again… If presidents can fire any member of the executive branch at will, why would anyone from the opposite party willing to criticize executive branch decisions be allowed to stay in the government?” Dayen asked. “You can make at least a colorable argument that a president should be allowed to have control over their subordinates… But when you add in the carve-out for the Federal Reserve, it quickly becomes totally ridiculous. There is no way to hold the two rulings together at once.”

In MS NOW, Ray Brescia suggested the Court “essentially authorized future harassment of Federal Reserve officials.”

“The Court has handed the administration yet another tool for applying pressure on [the Fed’s] members: the punishment of procedure,” Brescia wrote. “The Court did not look at the language of the two statutes at issue in [Cook and Slaughter]. Instead, it turned to the history of federal banking entities, like the existence of the First and Second Banks of the United States in the early days of the republic, to claim that monetary policy has been treated differently from other functions of the government over the years.”

“While the Court’s majority opinion in Cook’s case did technically reject the Trump administration’s efforts to terminate her from her position, it laid out a clear path for the administration to do so in the future,” Brescia said. “It must provide her notice of the ground or grounds upon which she is being terminated and she must be given an opportunity to challenge those allegations. Once a final decision is made by the executive branch, she can go to court to challenge that determination. But there is nothing stopping the administration from commencing such a process, on any basis it wants, or no basis at all.”

In The Atlantic, George Thomas wrote “an ‘originalist’ Court overturns an originalist decision.”

“[Humphrey’s Executor] offered a better understanding of the separation of powers — one consistent with constitutional history, originalist understandings, and earlier Court precedent — than what Roberts offers in Slaughter,” Thomas said. “In Humphrey’s, the Court saw a distinction between an administrative function (something the executive branch stewards) and true ‘executive power’ in the constitutional sense… By contrast, Roberts’s opinion in Slaughter collapses this distinction. For Roberts, to faithfully execute the law, the president must have the power to remove officers of independent commissions.”

“The Roberts Court is solidifying a formalistic version of the separation of powers that narrows congressional power while expanding presidential power. Its logic points to the idea that all administration functions… are an inherent part of the executive power and must be brought under the control of the president,” Thomas wrote. “Yet even Roberts cannot swallow the direction of his reasoning. That is why he exempted the Federal Reserve Board from the implications of his decision… Roberts notes that monetary policy at the core of the national bank’s mission is not subject ‘to plenary Presidential control.’ True. But this is just as true of the regulation of commerce or trade, so why doesn’t this logic apply to the Federal Trade Commission?”

What the right is saying.

• The right supports the decisions, particularly the overturning of Humphrey’s Executor.
• Some say Slaughter will allow presidents to more efficiently pursue their agenda.
• Others suggest the tension between Slaughter and Cook is difficult to reconcile.

In City Journal, Ilya Shapiro said “Humphrey’s Executor has been slaughtered.”

“The Supreme Court today restored an old-fashioned constitutional idea: if a principal federal officer exercises executive power, the president must be able to remove him,” Shapiro wrote. “Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that ‘Humphrey’s framework, in short, has not withstood the test of time.’ Then came the sentence that will launch a thousand administrative-law articles: ‘If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, we overrule it.’ The New Deal compromise that invented quasi-legislative agencies has finally met Article II of the U.S. Constitution.”

“This ruling isn’t a gift to Donald Trump or his successors. It’s a restoration of constitutional accountability. Congress can create executive-branch agencies and specify what they may do, but it cannot create a fourth branch of government and then pretend its officers are independent of the only person the Constitution makes responsible for executing federal law,” Shapiro said. “Taken together, Slaughter and Cook draw the right constitutional map. The FTC and similar agencies sit within the executive branch and must answer to the president. The Federal Reserve remains a narrow historical exception.”

The Washington Post editorial board wrote about “Lisa Cook’s close Supreme Court call.”

“Roberts explained that the Fed would effectively come under the president’s thumb if the firing stood, as ‘any perceived or alleged misstep (past or present) could provide a ready pretext for a Governor’s removal,’” the board said. “If the [Federal Reserve Act of 1913’s] ‘for cause’ provision is going to have teeth, Fed governors need to be insulated from arbitrary firing. The justices sidestepped what threshold the president needs to meet. That means Trump could still prevail in his effort to remove Cook, but the administration will need to at least devise a process that looks more legitimate than [Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill] Pulte’s search-and-destroy mission against Democrats.”

“There’s definitely a tension between [Cook and Slaughter]. The Fed, after all, acts more like a regulator than the country’s early central banks, such as by imposing fines on financial institutions. But the best way to lessen the tension isn’t to extinguish the Fed’s independence,” the board wrote. “The better solution is for Congress to reform the Fed so it focuses on its core monetary mission. Some of its regulatory functions could be eliminated or transferred to the Treasury Department.”

In The Washington Examiner, Jay Powers praised the Court for ending “[the] myth of ‘independent’ agencies.”

“[Humphrey’s Executor] was always a historical anomaly. It emerged from FDR’s war with the Supreme Court over New Deal agencies… The theory was that some agencies were quasi-legislative, quasi-judicial in nature, and therefore somehow outside normal executive authority,” Powers said. “That logic was always strained. The FTC administers roughly 80 statutes covering nearly every facet of the economy. It makes rules. It enforces law. It adjudicates disputes. That is executive work.”

“Congress can still require bipartisan composition. It can still structure agencies with staggered terms and Senate confirmation. What it cannot do is exempt those officers from removal when the president concludes they’re working against his administration’s policies. That’s the difference between a president who governs and a president who presides over a bureaucracy he can’t direct,” Powers wrote. “The electorate voted for a candidate with specific views on how these agencies should operate. Monday’s ruling means those views can actually be implemented.”

My take.

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• These cases underscore the tension between originalism in theory and practice.
• I tentatively side with the majority in Slaughter, but the Court isn’t consistent with its logic in Cook. 
• I think the practical effects of these decisions will be relatively limited — though long-term concerns remain. 

Associate Editor Audrey Moorehead: Slaughter and Cook are possibly the most fascinating set of decisions I’ve seen in my relatively brief time as a Court-watcher. 

It’s rare for the same justice to write two majority opinions in two very similar cases and come to two different conclusions joined by two different majorities — but that’s exactly what Chief Justice Roberts did here. Slaughter is the further-reaching case, granting the president the power to fire employees from any federal agency, even those established by Congress as independent (except, as Cook holds, the Federal Reserve). Reading the opinions in Slaughter, I found Roberts’s originalist understanding of the Constitution — and subsequent reasoning for overturning the Humphrey’s Executor precedent — more convincing than Justice Sotomayor’s dissent arguing for maintaining that precedent. But, like many Court-watchers, I ultimately struggle to reconcile Slaughter with Cook — and I find myself wondering whether the correct legal reasoning may lead to a bad outcome.

Many of the Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed justices are self-described originalists, meaning they prioritize the original intent of the Constitution and federal law (where it doesn’t conflict with the Constitution). The legal theory has outsized sway on this Court, but it comes with trade-offs, and one of the Court’s originalists once offered a fascinating and complicated analysis of this approach.

In 2017, when she was still a professor at Notre Dame Law School, Justice Amy Coney Barrett published an essay called Originalism and Stare Decisis, grappling with the question of how originalist justices ought to handle longstanding precedent. She acknowledged that originalism can conflict with the precedent that forms the basis for our constitutional order. She points to the New Deal–era expansions and changes in federal power (like those in the now-defunct decision Humphrey’s Executor) as an example of precedent that is in tension with an originalist understanding of the Constitution, but is so entrenched in modern governmental functions that rolling back those changes could prove deeply destabilizing. 

Interestingly, Barrett concedes that originalist judges can sometimes choose not to follow their principles to their absolute ends when they know doing so would risk overturning load-bearing precedent. Instead, she argues that the important thing is that their jurisprudence draws consistent lines in applying originalist readings or deferring to precedent.

This article has much to bear on Slaughter, which overturned the 90-year-old precedent set by Humphrey’s Executor by declaring that the president can fire federal officials, even those purported to belong to independent agencies where Congress initially attached “for cause” firing provisions. Barrett’s article put into words my misgivings about Slaughter, a case where sheer adherence to principle (which I usually admire) could potentially have cascading negative effects. I’d say Roberts and Kavanaugh agree with me, given that they ruled to preserve precedent in Cook — but here, I fear that their inconsistency only creates confusion. 

I find the majority’s reasoning — laid out by Chief Justice John Roberts — fairly airtight as a constitutional matter. Roberts is an attentive student of history, and his retelling of the first 150 years of the debate over executive power, before Humphrey’s Executor, was thorough and convincing. Then, he asserts that the Supreme Court had “long ago retreated from” applying Humphrey’s Executor to other agencies and even “undermined [its] premises at every turn.” In fact, Roberts argues, Humphrey’s is so difficult to apply that various lower courts have differed on its requirements — meaning that it doesn’t even create the stability that longstanding precedent often affords.

I’m aligned with all of these points, but Roberts’s argument begins to slip when he discusses Congress’s reliance upon Humphrey’s. The Chief Justice claims that Congress has relied upon this precedent to expand its own power, and that that expansion of power is “hardly one of the ‘legitimate’ reliance interests that our precedents contemplate.” Fair enough. But he fails to fully grapple with Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s counter that “ordinary Americans and regulated firms alike have organized their affairs understanding that some Government decisions will depend not on political favoritism or partisan advantage (or at least not only on those considerations), but on expertise, adherence to law, judgment, and the public good.”

Sotomayor is right that much of the country trusts these agencies more because they believe them to be nonpartisan and unaffected by the shifting tides of politics. Even if you think it shouldn’t be so — or if you think that the nonpartisan nature of these agencies is a sham — you’re still fighting against years of an established public understanding.

Roberts maintains that the American people’s interest in their constitutional guarantees is more important than their trust in nonpartisan agencies, but his high-minded appeal rings hollow. Whatever Roberts believes about the Constitution, functionally overturning the precedent of independent federal agencies seriously undermines the average American’s understanding of the way the government works or ought to work. 

The fundamental tension of the Court’s decision in Slaughter is illustrated by its opinion in Cook, where Roberts (again writing for the majority) hardly seems to grapple at all with why the Fed might be exempt from the rules he lays out in Slaughter. Indeed, that’s the very argument Justice Barrett makes in her Cook dissent — that the Court is inconsistent in its application of principle. Barrett was convinced by Roberts’s reasoning that the time had come to overturn Humphrey’s erroneous precedent, but if that’s the case, why stop one agency short? Justice Kavanaugh’s Cook concurrence attempts to establish that the Fed should be treated completely separately under historical precedent, but it’s not a consistently originalist argument. I’d say instead that Roberts and Kavanaugh are aware that pure originalism toward the Fed would invite the governmental chaos that Barrett once acknowledged as a major risk. 

Roberts and Kavanaugh come off as if they’re caught between two worlds. The three Democratic-appointed justices wanted to uphold Humphrey’s because of the precedent on their side. Justice Barrett decided that the application of principle was worth the risk of upending order (as did, presumably, Justices Gorsuch, Alito, and Thomas). But Roberts and Kavanaugh want to have their cake and eat it, too — they want to see a return to the pre-Humphrey’s principle, but they’re worried about the negative consequences of an overwhelming change. In the end, I think it fosters confused legal reasoning that will hurt, rather than help, the Court in future cases.

With that said, I’m optimistic that the partisan concerns about the effect of overturning Humphrey’s Executor are relatively overblown. Yes, this grants Trump more power over the federal government, but it also grants future presidents the same power, and I think on the whole that that could be a moderating force. After all, presidents ousting prior appointees isn’t anything new — President Biden spent the first part of 2021 cleaning house of various Trump appointees, in some cases breaking presidential precedent around agency appointees to do so.

Even if I’m less afraid of the long-term impacts of partisan staffing of these agencies, I’m still broadly worried about what this decision will do in the immediate future. The Roberts Court may have gotten the constitutional question right in Slaughter, but I’m left wondering if there might have been some other way to restore the constitutional order, without such a seismic shift in established precedent. If there’s anything I’ve learned from Trump II, it’s that a “move fast, break things” approach can have disastrous and unintended consequences.

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This day in history.

250 years ago today, the Continental Congress declared independence from Great Britain. The provisional government, meeting in Philadelphia, voted in favor of a resolution proposed by Delegate Richard Henry Lee. It read: “These United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”

John Adams, a Massachusetts delegate who would go on to become the second U.S. president, initially believed that July 2 would be the date celebrated for generations to come, featuring “Pomp and Parade with shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” Instead, Americans (including Adams himself) have typically celebrated the Fourth, the day Congress approved the final text of the Declaration of Independence.

The road not taken.

Our attention turned fully to the Supreme Court this week. And for good reason — the decisions released since last Thursday are some of the most consequential of this term. We considered covering a few non-Court stories — Rep. Tom Kean’s (R-NJ) return to Congress and John Bolton’s guilty plea — as well as the semi-Court-related story of NPR mistakenly reporting Justice Samuel Alito’s retirement. Ultimately, the six cases we covered between Monday and today all felt timely, and we didn’t want to choose an alternate topic just for the sake of mixing it up. 

While six cases in four days is a lot, we still had to pass on several other major SCOTUS decisions handed down this week. The rulings on Hawaii’s concealed-carry restrictions, rolling back rules on coordinated campaign spending, and bans on transgender athletes in women’s and girls’ sports were three that just missed the cut.

The extras.

• One year ago today we covered the Senate passing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. 
• The most clicked link in our last regular newsletter was our new video on why Britain keeps replacing its prime ministers.
• Nothing to do with politics: Predicting the song of the summer.
• Our last survey: 2,526 readers responded to our survey on the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship ruling, with 79% saying they supported the decision’s legal reasoning and its practical outcome. “It’s stunning to me that the outcome wasn’t 9–0,” one respondent said. “I think this was the right call legally, but feel that there is significant abuse of birthright citizenship,” said another.

Have a nice day.

Locals of Ealing, West London, were at their wits’ end with the consistent flooding around the Greenford Tube station brought on by regular heavy rainstorms. One group of conservationists suggested a nature-based solution: beavers. In 2023, a family of five wild beavers moved into Ealing to tackle the flooding problem, officially commencing the Ealing Beaver Project. The animals built dams, natural reservoirs and canals, and the residents have enjoyed their new neighbors. According to project leader Sean McCormack, by the beavers’ second winter at the site, the area went without flooding for the first time in a decade. CNN Climate has the story.