The Supreme Court Just Handed A Match To An Arsonist

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In a tumultuous week that marked four months since Donald Trump’s second inauguration, nothing will have as long-lasting and damaging an effect on American democracy as the Supreme Court’s decision yesterday to upend 90 years of its own precedent and strip independent agencies of their independence.

The high court’s six-justice conservative majority fundamentally altered the structural balance of power among the branches of the federal government. It handed vast new power to the White House to put politics above expertise, partisanship above reason, and power over principle.

All of that would have been bad enough at any other time, but the Roberts Court just handed a match to a confirmed arsonist in Donald Trump. As bad as the first four months of his second term have been, it was not enough to dislodge the conservative justices from their ideological attachment to the radical theory of a unitary executive.

The immediate result of their decision will be to enable and encourage Trump’s rampage across federal government to bring it to heel to his whims in dramatic and disturbing ways. But it also tilts the playing field of American politics in profound but often imperceptible ways that will persist for decades.

One wonders how independent agencies will even function. They were created and have existed over the course of nearly a century under a certain set of assumptions about the importance of experts, consistency in policy-making, and insulation from partisan politics. What is their use or reason for being now if they’re merely appendages of the White House doing its bidding?