The Court’s Hypocrisy; The New York Times, June 29, 2026

The Editorial Board, The New York Times; The Court’s Hypocrisy

"For nearly a century, the Supreme Court has made it difficult for a president to defy the clear text of a law passed by Congress. The court prevented Franklin D. Roosevelt from firing a leader of the Federal Trade Commission in 1935. It stopped the Reagan administration from defying a pollution investigation in 1988. It helped block Barack Obama’s attempt to expand immigration protections in 2016.

Its decision Monday allowing President Trump to fire F.T.C. commissioners represents a break with this history. The ruling dismisses longstanding precedent and effectively discards a 112-year-old law that said the president could fire commissioners only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.” Mr. Trump can now fire commissioners in regulatory agencies simply because he wants to...

Central to the success of the American experiment over nearly 250 years has been the balance of powers among the three branches of government. Together, Mr. Trump and this Supreme Court are upsetting that balance. They are deviating from a tradition that has lasted more than a century, in which parts of the government operate with bipartisan leadership removed from everyday partisan politics, as Congress intended. The effect is to sideline Congress, which the authors of the Constitution viewed as the primary branch among equals. The Supreme Court on Monday created a government run by a very small number of people who work at either the Supreme Court or the White House."

Make This Obstruction Thing Go Away; Slate, June 22, 2017

Dahlia Lithwick, Slate; Make This Obstruction Thing Go Away

"Much has been made of the fact that Trump fired his FBI Director James Comey either because of Comey’s Russia investigation or not because of it. Much has been made of the fact that he fired Sally Yates because he didn’t like the advice she offered about Michael Flynn and that he fired U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara because Bharara wouldn’t return his phone calls. Trump also makes endless businessman-y noises about his plans to fire Rod Rosenstein; Robert Mueller; and his attorney general, Jeff Sessions. And in the meantime, he surrounds himself with other lawyers, many of whom have no experience in government service but seemingly infinite experience in emptying his ashtrays. The personal attorneys he’s recently brought on to deal with the FBI investigation (which he claims doesn’t exist, incidentally) include a fellow who appears to be engaging in the same branding and get-rich side gigs that Trump dabbles in himself and another lawyer who was on the losing side of the massive Trump University suit for which the president had to pay $25 million to settle claims from students who alleged they’d been defrauded. Nobody should be surprised, then, that Trump’s personal lawyer is now doing work that should be done by the White House Counsel’s office. We also shouldn’t be surprised that some of the Trump ashtray-emptiers now have to hire their own ashtray-emptiers. Nobody’s ever said “no” to those guys either.

This pattern goes a long way toward explaining why most serious Washington lawyers want nothing to do with the president’s dubious criminal defense dream team. Lawyers who have been trained to answer to the Constitution first and their wealthy clients far later don’t want to be in the position of having to tell the world’s largest preschooler that sometimes no bendy straw for the juice box really means no bendy straw for the juice box."