Roberts’s Rules: Slaughtered and Cooked

Two sequential rulings from the High Court in one day contain a deeply cynical contradiction.

Image courtesy of Balls and Strikes

On Monday, the Supreme Court handed down two back-to-back decisions on the question of presidential power over the executive branch. The results are, by almost any honest accounting, impossible to square.

In Trump v. Slaughter, the Court’s six conservative justices voted to demolish a 91-year-old precedent protecting independent federal agencies from presidential removal, declaring that President Trump may fire most independent agency heads at will and that Congress may not stand in his way.

Hours later, in Trump v. Cook, a different five-justice majority, with the three liberals joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, blocked the same president from removing a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Roberts’s opinion carved out a special exception for the central bank that the Slaughter majority had just categorically refused to virtually every other independent agency. Both opinions were written by Roberts and released the same morning.

The tension between the two rulings did not escape the justices themselves. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who joined the Slaughter majority, wrote in her dissent in Cook that the majority opinion “is in serious tension with Trump v. Slaughter, which we also decide today.” Justice Sotomayor, dissenting in Slaughter, called the majority’s treatment of the Federal Reserve an “ad hoc exception” to the Court’s “totalizing” and “half-baked” interpretation of presidential power.

The Slaughter-then-Cook rulings produce a confusing meal that grants the president a level of dominance over the executive branch not seen since before the New Deal, while exempting precisely one institution from that same logic. (Spoiler: it’s the one that could impact the finances of the billionaire donor class.) Roberts does so with reasoning he struggles to articulate, only adding to the growing crisis over the Court’s credibility.

Slaughter House Six

Rebecca Kelly Slaughter’s path to the center of a landmark constitutional battle was, in its own way, a product of Trump’s doing. Trump first appointed her to a Democratic seat on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 2018, and President Biden renominated her to a second term set to expire in 2029. Then in March 2025, the White House notified her that she had been removed from the commission, effective immediately. The letter cited no statutory cause, such as inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance. It told her only that her continued service was “inconsistent with [the] Administration’s priorities” and that she was removed “pursuant to [the president’s] authority under Article II of the Constitution.”

Her firing was a test case for a theory known as the “unitary executive theory,” which has been building on the right for decades. I wrote about its origins and ambitions earlier in The Big Picture. Its proponents construe the Constitution’s vesting of executive power in the president to mean that Congress and the courts have little power to limit his control over the executive branch. That renders the president, in effect, a “CEO” who can fire anyone under him at will. Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center for Justice described the theory as “a fancy way of saying that a chief executive can rule over the executive branch like a monarch. In other words, every one of its millions of employees serves at the president’s beck and call as though they were caddies at Mar-a-Lago.”

The theory’s most influential architect is Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and the author of Chapter 2, “Executive Office of the President of the United States,” in Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership.” Vought wrote there that “the executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America” and that “the President must set and enforce a plan for the executive branch”—treating the entire federal apparatus as an extension of his personal will. Monday’s Slaughter ruling is, in significant part, the judicial ratification of that vision.

At issue in Slaughter was the FTC’s governing statute, in place since 1914, which barred the president from removing commissioners except for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” That protection had been upheld by the Supreme Court in 1935 in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, a unanimous ruling that held Congress could shield officials of independent agencies from at-will presidential removal. I covered the history and stakes of that precedent in depth last December in another Big Picture piece when the Slaughter case was heading to argument. As I wrote then, the logic behind Humphrey’s Executor extended well beyond the FTC: it was the foundation on which the entire independent administrative state was built, allowing career experts to do their jobs “without fear that unpopular decisions could cost them their jobs.”

As I also noted then, Roberts had already been on a long mission to impose the unitary executive theory as official Supreme Court doctrine, and the odds were never in Humphrey’s favor.

Those odds played out Monday. In a 36-page opinion, Roberts reversed the lower court ruling that had reinstated Slaughter. The modern FTC, he argued, bore no resemblance to the quasi-judicial body Humphrey’s Executor described in 1935. It now “enforces and administers some 80 statutes, which cover almost every facet of our Nation’s economy,” carries out investigations, enforces compliance through in-house adjudications, and “files civil suits on behalf of the United States in federal court.” An agency with that portfolio exercises core executive power, Roberts concluded, which means its commissioners serve as the president’s subordinates, subject to his removal. “If anything more is left of Humphrey’s,” he wrote, “we overrule it.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch filed a concurrence that captured the majority’s mood with characteristic bluntness: “Independent agencies are not so independent after all.” Trump’s reaction on Truth Social was predictably less measured. “To show the importance of the Slaughter Case,” he wrote, “90 years of precedent has been COMPLETELY AND UNEQUIVOCALLY OVERRULED, greatly increasing Presidential Power at a time when it is most needed!”

Justice Sotomayor read her dissent from the bench, a rare act signaling deep disagreement. She wrote that the majority gives the president “a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once-coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.” That’s an originalist argument that the majority simply ignored.

The ruling’s practical scope extends well beyond the FTC. It throws into serious question all removal protections, including for commissioners at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Merit Systems Protection Board, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and a host of other agencies Congress structured on the assumption that Humphrey’s Executor would hold. Slaughter herself named these stakes at a press conference after the ruling: “Today’s ruling makes it possible for presidents to fire watchdogs who won’t put politics over principle, and replace them with lapdogs. It’s a recipe for corruption; working families will pay the price.”

The majority’s logic, taken on its own terms, has a certain internal consistency: if the president is constitutionally responsible for faithful execution of the laws, he must control the people carrying them out. The problem is what the Court did next, in the same morning, in the very next opinion.

The Court’s reasoning gets Cooked

If Slaughter was the culmination of a decades-long conservative legal project, Trump v. Cook was something harder to categorize. It reached a conclusion seemingly opposite to Slaughter, not because the legal principles differed in any obvious way, but because the institution at issue was the Federal Reserve, and the consequences of getting it wrong were too catastrophic to ignore.

In August 2025, Trump purported to fire Lisa Cook, a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. She has the distinction of being the first governor to be fired in the central bank’s 111-year history. Cook is an economist, a Biden appointee and the first Black woman to serve on the Fed’s Board of Governors.

The stated reason for her removal was a claim by FHFA Director Bill Pulte, a Trump political appointee who also now serves as acting director of national intelligence, that Cook had committed mortgage fraud before her appointment to the Fed. It was the same kind of allegation leveled against other political enemies of Trump, including Sen. Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Cook denied the allegations, and no criminal finding had been made against her. Cook and others believed Trump’s firing was politically motivated, in her case by her refusal to vote for the interest rate cuts he had been publicly demanding from the central bank. Cook filed suit immediately, and a federal district court blocked her removal pending the outcome of her lawsuit.

The Federal Reserve Act, passed by Congress in 1913, provides that members of the Board of Governors serve fixed 14-year terms and may be removed by the president only “for cause.” The White House argued that once the president determined he had cause to fire Cook, that determination was effectively unreviewable—there’s that “unitary executive” argument cropping up again—and that the judiciary had no role to play.

The Court declined in this instance to accept that sweeping position. In a 5-4 ruling, Roberts, joined by Kavanaugh and all three liberal justices, upheld the district court’s preliminary injunction blocking Cook’s removal while her lawsuit proceeds. The majority held that Trump had failed to afford Cook the basic due process the Federal Reserve Act requires before a governor can be removed. Announcing her termination via Truth Social was legally insufficient. Roberts wrote that Cook “was entitled to some explanation of the evidence at issue, some avenue for a response, and a deadline by which a response would be due — and only then can the courts assess the validity and sufficiency of such charges.” Roberts called the opinion “narrow,” leaving the lower courts to resolve the underlying merits.

But the opinion went beyond procedure. Roberts grounded the majority’s reasoning in the design and historical pedigree of the Federal Reserve itself. He invoked Alexander Hamilton’s 1790 Report on a National Bank and the tradition of central bank independence stretching from the First and Second Banks of the United States—the “great regulating wheel” of the early American financial system—to the modern Fed. “Not only the fact of independence but also the appearance of independence is key to the Federal Reserve’s design,” Roberts wrote.

Justice Kavanaugh, in a concurrence, was even more direct about what was driving the result. He warned that even leaving the question of the Fed’s independence open “would create significant uncertainty about whether the Court might soon eliminate the Federal Reserve’s independence, and thereby expose the Federal Reserve to political influences and jeopardize the efficacy of U.S. monetary policy.” () In plain terms: the markets could not handle the uncertainty, so the Court stepped in to remove it.

The breadth of concern surrounding the case had been striking. Every living current or former Federal Reserve Board chair, plus former Treasury secretaries and prominent economists from both parties, signed an amicus brief urging the Court not to disturb the Fed’s independence. The message was unmistakable: a politicized Federal Reserve, whose governors serve at the president’s pleasure and vote accordingly on interest rates, could destabilize global financial markets.

The Court heard all of that, and a majority of justices agreed. But readers coming to Cook fresh off Slaughter immediately asked the question the Court itself struggled to answer: Didn’t they just say independence doesn’t matter?

Some of the sharpest criticism along this line has come not from outside the Court, but from within it.

The Cooked bit, carved out

The most damning critiques of the Court’s paired rulings came from justices who had just voted on opposite sides of them.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who joined the Slaughter majority, wrote in dissent in Cook that the two opinions resist reconciliation. She noted that Slaughter “announces a categorical rule: Whenever ‘an agency executes a congressional mandate against private parties, it exercises executive power’ and must be subject to plenary executive control — ‘no ifs, ands, or quasis about it.’ Yet here,” she wrote, “the Court claims a special exception ‘sanctioned by history’ and based on the Federal Reserve’s role in setting monetary policy. How can history support both a categorical rule and a carveout?” Barrett pressed further, asking whether the Fed’s existing regulatory powers, such as supervision of banks and enforcement of financial rules, have the requisite connection to monetary policy to survive the Slaughter rule, and if not, whether they are simply grandfathered in. “The Court does not say,” she wrote.

Justice Sotomayor, for her part, arrived at the same place from the other direction in her Slaughter dissent, warning that Slaughter creates “line-drawing” problems that were previously absent under long-standing precedent. The old framework under Humphrey’s Executor was imperfect, but it had the virtue of consistency: agencies exercising quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial functions were protected, and everyone knew where they stood. The new framework declares the president controls everything—except, apparently, the one institution whose independence the financial markets would not tolerate losing.

Legal scholars outside the Court have also struggled to identify a principled basis for the distinction. Writing in Talking Points Memo, former Federal Reserve banking regulation attorney Jeremy Kress observed that he always expected the Court to spare the Fed, but predicted

“it would have to do it in kind of a hand-wavey way — and I think that’s what we got in Cook. It’s not particularly persuasive or intellectually honest, but the Court clearly felt like it needed to distinguish the Fed and it did the best that it could.”

Cornell Law professor Robert C. Hockett put it more sharply, observing that the paired decisions reflect “a massive difference in degree being disguised as a difference in kind.” In Hockett’s telling, even the most ideologically committed justices are “more hesitant about screwing around with the Fed” when the alternative is handing someone like Trump the power to destabilize global monetary policy.

Legal reporter Chris Geidner offered a devastating critique of the two opinions’ incompatibility, noting that Roberts’s own opening sentences gave the game away. The Cook opinion begins: “Last August, for the first time in the Federal Reserve’s 111-year history, the President attempted to fire one of its Governors.” Twenty-two words, Geidner observed, that told everyone the Court could not believe what Trump had done. Everything that followed fit neatly with that opening. The Slaughter opinion, by contrast, opens with nearly 500 words about the Framers’ vision of executive power without once mentioning Slaughter’s firing or the Humphrey’s Executor precedent about to be demolished. The contrast in tone, Geidner wrote, reflects that Roberts “showed the emptiness of the project” simply by writing both opinions.

Justice Gorsuch’s concurrence in Slaughter, meant as a celebration of the majority’s ruling, laid bare the downstream damage. As Geidner highlighted, Gorsuch acknowledged that all the agencies Congress built in reliance on Humphrey’s Executor now exist in a form Congress never intended. Their lawmaking and adjudicative powers were folded overnight into presidential control. “The power to write new regulatory crimes still exists,” Gorsuch wrote, “but now the pen ultimately rests in the President’s hand. The ability to judge disputes in-house remains, but now the house is white.”

Even Justice Thomas, who dissented in Cook on the grounds that Trump should have been allowed to fire her, acknowledged the contradiction. As Geidner noted, Thomas quoted both Roberts opinions back-to-back to make the point: Slaughter says “the Constitution vests the whole executive power in the President alone,” while Cook simultaneously holds that the Fed may exercise executive power “independen[t] from Presidential control.” As Geidner put it, Thomas is wrong that Cook should have gone the other way, “but he is right that there is a contradiction.”

Rebecca Slaughter highlighted the contradiction at her post-ruling press conference and raised what many believe is driving it. “Somehow Wall Street is special and gets special treatment, but other than that, the agencies that look out for everyday Americans do not,” she declared.

Kate Riga, writing for Talking Points Memo, offered a similarly blunt diagnosis. The paired decisions “reveal the right-wing Court’s priorities—it may be sanguine about the demolition of agencies mostly used to regulate big business and protect worker rights, but is far less willing to let President Trump take over the Fed and unleash global economic chaos.” On the Cook majority specifically, Riga concluded that “Roberts reverse engineered a reason to protect the Fed, but no other similarly constituted agencies, from at-will firing.”

This pattern is eroding the Court’s credibility in real time. The public is asked to absorb an accumulation of outcomes that track desired results for the right more reliably than any stated principles. When the Court announces a categorical rule in one breath and creates an inadequately explained exception to it in the very next—one that somehow, magically benefits big business interests—it invites the inference that the rule was always secondary to the result.

And when that inference becomes widespread, the justices’ authority to say what the law is comes to depend less on the persuasiveness of their reasoning and more on the simple fact that they have the last word.