President Donald Trump was dealt a major blow when the Supreme Court ruled to uphold mail-in voting, but the "win" Trump saw with the high court's decision in Trump v. Slaughter might come back to haunt him and the GOP, an analyst reported on Tuesday.
In Slaughter, the Supreme Court ruled that the president has the power to fire members of formerly independent agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, The Bulwark's White House correspondent Andrew Egger explained.
"But there’s no question that this conservative Court has one ideological priority that aligns perfectly with Trump’s own," Egger wrote. "They see the independent agency structure—in which Congress impanels some regulatory body, gives them broad policy-setting and enforcement authorities, and insulates them from political accountability by setting up mechanisms that make their members difficult to fire—as inherently dubious under the Constitution."
And in Slaughter, the justices sided with Trump.
"Wherever Congress carves off portions of the executive power and enshrines it in regulatory bodies, the president must have the broad ability to hire and fire at those bodies, since the Constitution stipulates that he is the individual in which the executive power rests," Egger reported. "Moreover, the logic goes, if the president is to 'take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed' as the Constitution requires, he must have the power to remove people who are not faithfully executing the laws."
However, the ruling could create future problems for Trump — and Republicans.
"Still, the president’s exultation may not last long," Egger wrote. "He is, of course, too solipsistic to see it, but he isn’t going to be the president forever. In his shortsightedness, he has grown obsessed with changing the direction of the country via executive power alone. Twice now, he has come into office with Republican supermajorities in Congress, poised to remake the nation’s laws in durable ways. What does he have to show for it? A couple of tax-cut bills, one per term. Trump continues to show remarkable disdain for the sausage-making and horse-trading of the legislative process; just yesterday, he dismissed his own administration’s housing bill as 'a yawn.'"
"But after he leaves office, his laws will be all he can count on remaining," Egger added. "Yes, the Supreme Court has made it easier for Trump to remake the government in his image for now. But they’ve done just as much to make it easier for the next Democratic president to blot out that image once he’s gone."
