John Roberts Defies the Supreme Court

[Celerity]

If the chief justice was once a judicial institutionalist, he has become all too eager to cast norms and precedent aside in matters that benefit Trump.

https://newrepublic.com/article/200171/john-roberts-defies-supreme-court


President Donald Trump greets Chief Justice John Roberts at an address to a joint session of Congress.

Last month, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh denounced what they perceived to be a growing problem: federal judges in the lower courts ignoring the Supreme Court’s decisions in major cases. “Lower court judges may sometimes disagree with this court’s decisions, but they are never free to defy them,” they gravely intoned. Their target was Judge William Young, a federal judge in Massachusetts appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1985, who allegedly defied the court’s orders in a case involving frozen NIH grants. He had distinguished the case from one involving frozen Department of Education grants earlier this year. In a court session last week, Young apologized for any perceived defiance. Other jurists, including retired Justice Stephen Breyer, have since come to Young’s defense.

If Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are looking for other targets for their ire, there is good news: Another prominent federal judge issued an order on Monday that defied both black-letter federal law and long-standing Supreme Court precedent. They might even be able to identify the culprit on sight since they all work in the same building. Chief Justice John Roberts stayed a lower court order on Monday that had prevented President Donald Trump from removing Rebecca Slaughter, a commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission, without cause. His administrative stay was done solely through his own authority as a circuit justice—more on that later—and without the input of any other justices.

The move, which effectively suspends Slaughter from office while litigation unfolds, is impossible to square with the last 90 years of Supreme Court decisions, including ones that directly apply to the matter at hand. Roberts did not write to explain his reasoning or why the emergency intervention was justified. Slaughter is one of the many federal officials removed by the White House since January despite having legal protections against their dismissal. Trump announced his intent to oust Slaughter and another FTC commissioner in March. (The other commissioner has since dropped out of the litigation.)

Her litigation stands apart, however, because she works for the agency for which the Supreme Court first upheld for-cause protections in 1935. Since the FTC’s establishment in 1914, Congress has prohibited presidents from firing FTC commissioners except “for cause,” a term that in this case meant “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” Slaughter does not stand accused of any wrongdoing. A lawyer by trade who previously worked for New York Senator Chuck Schumer, she was initially appointed to the FTC with Senate approval by none other than Trump himself in 2018 for one of the Democratic seats on the agency. (Federal law also requires a partisan balance of seats on the board.) President Joe Biden renominated her for a second seven-year term in 2023, and the Senate again duly confirmed her.

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[kentuck]

1. Trump whispers...

"Thank you, John..."