US Supreme Court rules Trump can fire Federal Trade Commission official

WASHINGTON: The Supreme Court ruled Monday that US President Donald Trump can fire a Federal Trade commissioner, fortifying the executive branch’s power to staff elite jobs in independent agencies with political allies.

In a 6-3 ruling, the court’s conservative majority rejected a challenge by Democratic commissioner Rebecca Slaughter to her dismissal, writing that “subordinates who exercise the President’s power are subject to removal by him”.

The decision is expected to also give Trump greater hiring and firing authority at agencies beyond the FTC.

Slaughter was dismissed without cause and lower courts upheld her claim that the move violated rules Congress put in place to protect the members of independent government agencies.

But in Monday’s decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court’s majority cited writings by James Madison – a framer of the US constitution who became president – and other Supreme Court rulings that empowered the president on personnel decisions.

Roberts characterised a 1935 ruling cited by Slaughter that prohibited the firing of an FTC official as an outlier decision with an obsolete view of the agency’s role.

“Independent agencies are not ‘independent’ in the sense that they are free of the President and thus responsive ‘only to the people of the US’,” Roberts wrote in a decision that frequently cited earlier rulings.

The president’s ceding of power to independent agencies “does not deliver us to a promised land of technocratic governance – it often results only in an ‘increased subservience to congressional direction’,” Roberts said.

Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren slammed the opinion, saying, “Donald Trump has fired Democratic appointees and seized control of formerly independent agencies so they serve him and his billionaire friends instead of the American public.”

Trump, meanwhile, cheered the outcome, calling the ruling “one of the most important ever given with respect to Presidential Powers.”