The Supreme Court is Weighing a Case to Decide if Donald Trump is 'Actually' the President of the United States

"SCOTUS... would restore presidential authority over the executive branch... This can’t happen a moment too soon."

The Washington Establishment is bracing for one of the most sweeping shifts in executive power in nearly a century. And it all hinges on a Supreme Court case over an arcane, unconstitutional loophole that bureaucrats have been invoking to shield themselves from accountability.

On Monday, the Supreme Court signaled that it may be ready to strike down this 90-year-old precedent that insulated the leaders of “independent agencies” from presidential removal.

This is a crucial test to decide if Donald J. Trump is actually the President of the United States, and is in charge of his own administration.

For nearly a century, Washington has operated under the polite fiction that the President runs the executive branch while “independent” agencies operate… independently.

The FTC, the NLRB, the SEC — all treated as self-contained fiefdoms whose leaders can ignore the White House because Congress said so in 1935.

That arrangement has never fit the text of Article II, and it has never reflected democratic accountability.

If the Supreme Court rules in his favor in the legal case Trump v. Slaughter, President Trump will not merely win the right to remove a single member of the Federal Trade Commission. He will trigger a constitutional correction that legal conservatives have been fighting for since Reagan — the restoration of Article II authority over the federal bureaucracy.

Justice Neil Gorsuch — long seen as the intellectual center of the Court’s anti-administrative movement — all but invited the death of Humphrey’s from the bench:

“Maybe it’s a recognition that Humphrey’s Executor was poorly reasoned and that there is no such thing in our constitutional order as a 4th branch of government.”

The signal could not have been clearer. The Constitution vests “all executive power” in the President. Yet for nearly 90 years, presidents have been told that they cannot remove the very people who wield that power — so long as Congress designates them “independent.”

The amicus brief filed by Missouri’s Senator Eric Schmitt, supporting Trump, lays out eight key reasons for overturning Humphrey’s Executor, all of which were echoed in Monday’s argument:

• The precedent contradicts the plain text of Article II.

• It destroys democratic accountability by creating agencies the President cannot control.

• The Founders expected — and repeatedly affirmed — broad presidential removal power.

• The “quasi-legislative, quasi-judicial” fiction used to justify independent agencies has been abandoned by modern doctrine.

• Courts and agencies alike are trapped in a doctrinal thicket that makes no logical sense.

• The precedent helped create a sprawling, unaccountable “fourth branch.”

• No meaningful reliance interests prevent overturning it.

• Only a clean overruling will stop the constant litigation and creeping expansion of insulated power centers.

The Supreme Court’s arguments in Trump v. Slaughter didn’t sound like a cautious court testing the waters. They sounded like a majority that’s finally ready to say out loud what everyone has known for years: the federal government has been running an unconstitutional side-branch of power, and Humphrey’s Executor — the ruling that created it — is running on fumes.

Justice Gorsuch said what the legal profession pretends not to see: Humphrey’s Executor was “poorly reasoned,” and there is “no such thing in our constitutional order as a fourth branch of government.”

The other conservative justices barely hid their skepticism. Even the ones who normally tiptoe around precedent seemed unwilling to defend a doctrine that’s not just outdated, but fundamentally incompatible with how the government actually works in 2025.

The amicus briefs supporting President Trump did not mince words. They argue that the Founders explicitly vested removal power in the President, that early practice confirmed it, and that modern carve-outs have produced an unaccountable bureaucracy shielded by legal magic words like “quasi-legislative” and “quasi-judicial.”

These terms have always been placeholders for an uncomfortable truth: independent agencies exercise executive power while insulated from executive control. If the President cannot remove the officers who execute the laws, then someone else is executing them — and that “someone else” is not elected by anyone.

This isn’t political; it’s structural. Democracy requires a visible chain of responsibility. If voters hate what the government is doing, they need to know whom to punish. Under the Humphrey’s framework, they punish the President for decisions made by officials he cannot fire. That’s not accountability; that’s institutional gatekeeping.

Senator Mike Lee said it best: “SCOTUS has the chance to overturn *Humphrey’s Executor,* which would restore presidential authority over the executive branch, freeing us from bureaucratic tyranny. This can’t happen a moment too soon.”

The establishment media reacted to the Court’s skepticism with dire warnings about Trump dismantling the civil service. But the case isn’t about rank-and-file employees or the future of the federal workforce. It’s about whether Congress can create executive officers the President can’t remove.

Everything else is noise — intentional noise, meant to conflate a narrow constitutional question with sweeping doomsday hypotheticals.

If the Court overturns Humphrey’s Executor, it won’t be unleashing a “dictator,” as some headlines began hinting. It will be acknowledging reality: the doctrine has already eroded in practice. The Court has repeatedly allowed Trump’s removal decisions to stand. Lower courts openly struggle to apply a precedent that no longer fits modern agencies.

What remains is a zombified rule — cited nostalgically, ignored operationally, and preserved mainly because Washington likes the convenience of unaccountable power.

The panic is less about legal theory and more about losing a political shield. Independent agencies have been Congress’s workaround for avoiding responsibility. If the President can fire commissioners, then Congress loses its ability to outsource controversial decisions to faceless boards and then blame the White House for whatever happens next. Overturning Humphrey’s ends the era of federally sanctioned buck-passing.

The broader point is simpler: a country cannot have three branches of government plus a bonus round. The Constitution did not authorize a bureaucratic escape hatch where powerful regulators sit outside presidential reach. The “fourth branch” exists only because the Court let it exist. And now, the Court looks ready to close the loophole.

Trump, for his part, will get the headlines. But the ruling — if it matches the oral argument tone — will outlast him and every future president. It will restore the presidency to what the Constitution actually designed: the control point for executive power, fully accountable to voters and fully empowered to manage the branch he alone is elected to lead.

Whether the opinion is sweeping or narrowly tailored, the direction is unmistakable. The Court is signaling that the great constitutional drift of the 20th century has reached its limit. If Humphrey’s falls, it won’t be a radical expansion of presidential power. It will be the admission that the Constitution means what it says, even if Washington got used to pretending otherwise.

And that, more than anything, is what truly alarms the unelected presidents who have believed for too long that they are actually the ones in charge.