Will the Supreme Court Crash the Global Economy?

The case in question consolidates two litigations challenging Trump’s firing of commissioners of, respectively,
the National Labor Relations Board, or #NLRB (Wilcox v. Trump),
and the Merit Systems Protection Board, or #MSPB (Harris v. [Treasury Secretary Scott] Bessent).

Both of the terminated officials are covered by ⭐️statutory for-cause-only removal safeguards.

Trump and his legal minions acknowledge that there was no basis for removing either official in the requirements specified in the applicable statutes;
both officials had exemplary performance records, which plainly failed to meet the identical criteria in both statutes that permit removal only for “inefficiency, neglect, or malfeasance.”

💥Nonetheless, Trump’s Justice Department lawyers maintain that he can ignore these strictures because the Constitution bars Congress from placing any limits on his ability to fire agency heads for any reason or no reason.
“The President,” Solicitor General John Sauer told the justices in his brief, “should not be forced to delegate his executive power to agency heads who are demonstrably at odds with the Administration’s policy objectives for a single day.” 

In 2020, when conservative justices comprised a five-justice majority, the court decided 5–4,
♦️in Seila Law v CFPB, that the Constitution mandated at-will status for single-headed executive agencies
—namely, in that case, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

But the decision expressly declined to extend this mandate to multimember “independent” agencies, such as the NLRB and the MSPB.
The justices can no longer dodge that fraught question.

On April 7, a 7–4 majority of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected the Trump administration’s claim.
The majority (consisting of all seven of the court’s judges appointed by Democratic presidents) ruled that a 1935 Supreme Court decision upholding for-cause removal protections for heads of multimember agencies remained binding precedent,
never mind that it has fallen out of favor with their Republican-appointed colleagues and other legal luminaries on the right.

The Court of Appeals majority ordered the reinstatement of both of the agency board members Trump had fired, pending the outcome of the litigation.

Two days later, Solicitor General Sauer filed an emergency petition in the Supreme Court seeking reversal of the reinstatement order.

Chief Justice Roberts’s warp-speed grant of Sauer’s petition, three hours after it was filed, was interpreted as merely giving the justices time to mull the weighty issues at stake,
not presaging the result after they complete that process
Sauer asked the court to hear and decide the case in the current term, which expires at the end of June.

⚠️Why might a critical mass of the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority shrink from letting their ideology propel them to broaden untrammeled presidential firing authority to multiheaded agencies? ❓

Two potential reasons spring to mind:

the real-world consequences of such an extension

and the doctrinal and empirical holes in the undergirding #unitary #executive theory that scholars have exposed since Justice Antonin Scalia first expounded the current version of that concept in 1988. 

Of the two, the calamitous-consequences barrier, while as yet only fleetingly acknowledged by the justices, is no doubt the most daunting.

👉In particular, two words give that prospect intimidating force.
Those words are #the #Fed.

As legal scholar Stephen Vladeck recently wrote,
🆘“The not-very-well-kept secret is that the justices are (understandably) wary about handing down a ruling that would allow any President, and perhaps this one in particular, to exercise
🔥direct control over U.S. monetary policy by controlling who sits on the Federal Reserve Board.”

Since the original Framers’ establishment of the first and, especially, the second Bank of the United States, a broad and bipartisan consensus has hardened,
in the U.S. as well as every industrialized nation,
that an independent central bank with far-reaching powers is essential to maintaining monetary stability and sustaining economic growth.
https://newrepublic.com/article/193836/supreme-court-crash-economy-nlrb