2025-12-09 07:29:26
Oral arguments at the Supreme Court on Monday over the president’s power to remove the commissioners of independent agencies left little doubt that its Republican-appointed justices are about to fundamentally reorder our system of government. They appear ready to eliminate most pockets of expertise and nonpartisanship that we rely on as stewards of important economic, political, scientific, and regulatory power.
They will do this, if this morning’s arguments are any indication, without grappling with the predictable and disastrous fallout, with the endpoint of their own logic, or the historical record to the contrary. Instead, the six Republican appointees appear ready to race headlong into a Trumpian future in which no agency or decision is beyond the reach of the precedent’s political cronies.
“You’re asking us to destroy the structure of government,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor observed Monday, “and to take away from Congress its ability to protect its idea that the government is better structured with some agencies that are independent.”
FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, a Trump and Biden appointee whose case is now before the court, sued after Trump fired her in March for not aligning with his agenda, despite his being prohibited from removing commissioners except for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”
Slaughter’s case hearkens to the earliest days of the republic, when Congress first created independent agencies with limits on the president’s ability to remove the commissioners who run them. In their modern incarnation, beginning in the late 19th century, Congress has placed these agencies under the direction of a bipartisan group of commissioners who serve set, staggered terms and can only be removed for cause. The goal is to create expertise and independence, so that some of the government’s work is insulated from the abusive pull of political decision-making.
In 1935, a unanimous Supreme Court upheld the for-cause removal protections for independent agency commissioners in a ruling known as Humphrey’s Executor. But since taking office in January, Trump has removed the Democratic commissioners from several of these agencies, in violation of the Humphrey’s Executor precedent and multiple laws, seeking to eliminate their independence. He’s fired Democratic commissioners of the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit System Protection Board, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the FTC’s Slaughter.
It wasn’t a mystery where this case was headed. For years, the Roberts Court has sought to weaken and undermine Humphrey’s Executor, to reshape the federal government as a quasi-monarchical institution in which the president controls everything in the executive branch. This goal is intellectualized through the unitary executive theory, an invention of Ronald Reagan’s administration—in which Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito both served—to arrogate more power to the White House when Democrats had an unshakeable hold on Congress.
This is the whole problem in a nutshell: The majority does not really think it is bound by its own logic.
This year, the GOP wing of the court has been so eager to overturn Humphrey’s Executor that it actually couldn’t wait for the chance to issue a decision to render the precedent a nullity in practice. Thus, since Trump began firing Democratic commissioners, in January, the Supreme Court has repeatedly stepped in to allow those firings to take effect while the litigation over them proceeds, even though the firings clearly violated both the law and Humphrey’s Executor.
Despite the obvious direction this court was moving, it was still unsettling to hear six justices completely unwilling to acknowledge and wrestle with the consequences of overturning a 90-year-old precedent that acts as a pillar of the separation of powers that endeavors to protect key government functions from the corrosive effects of partisan politics.
Take this exchange between Justice Elena Kagan, Solicitor General John Sauer, and Alito. Kagan began by pressing Sauer on the logical consequences of his argument that all the executive power rests with the president, such that he must be able to remove anyone engaged in executive branch functions. What about courts set up by Congress—separate from federal courts under the federal judiciary—such as the Tax Court and the Court of Federal Claims? What about civil servants and government employees?
Sauer demurred that laws protecting civil servants and other employees haven’t been challenged—yet.
“I know you haven’t challenged it,” Kagan responded. “It’s really, the question is, ‘Where does this lead? What does it take you to, given what your primary rationale is?”
Then Alito piped up to suggest that maybe the court could just blow up our system of government without thinking through these pesky details.
“Suppose we were to decide this case in your favor without reaching some of the agencies that have been mentioned, like the Tax Court and the Claims Court and the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces,” Alito asked Sauer. “What would you propose that we say so as to reserve decision on those agencies?” Sauer happily responded that the court could simply say that it was withholding judgement on them.
An exasperated Kagan jumped back in. “Our logic has consequences,” she said. “Once you use a particular kind of argument to justify one thing, you can’t turn your back on that kind of argument if it also justifies another thing in the exact same way. And so, putting a footnote in the opinion saying we don’t decide X, Y and Z, because it’s not before us, doesn’t do much good if the entire logic of the opinion drives you there.”
This is actually the whole problem in a nutshell. The majority does not really think it is bound by its own logic. Next month, the Court is going to decide whether Trump can remove a governor of the Federal Reserve Board, a removal that could spook the markets and have more immediate and disastrous economic consequences than his takeover of the FTC.
And so the court appears poised to allow the president to take over the agencies it wants to transform into political entities, and preserve the independence of the ones it wants to keep independent, and use words like “uniquely structured” and “distinct historical tradition” to pretend this isn’t a consequentialist, results-driven exercise in hackery. On the other hand, if the justices want to embrace the logic that civil service laws violate the president’s executive power, then it will continue in this vein until it has replaced all experts and meritorious hires with cronies and nepo babies.
Just as the Republican justices avoided this logical incongruity, they also avoided the consequences of reordering some of the government, from an arrangement in which experts, scientists, and bipartisan commissions control at least some sensitive and technical decision-making to one in which political favoritism and corruption rule. Jackson pushed that issue repeatedly at oral argument.
The entire oral argument was infused with contempt for Congress’ authority and democratic legitimacy.
“My understanding was that independent agencies exist because Congress has decided that some issues, some matters, some areas should be handled in this way by nonpartisan experts,” she said. “So having a president come in and fire all the scientists and the doctors and the economists and the PhDs, and replacing them with loyalists and people who don’t know anything, is actually not in the best interest of the citizens of the United States.”
Relatedly, Jackson continued, why should the president’s desire to control everything take precedence over Congress’ judgment that some functions should be run by independent agencies? “Given the history of the monarchy and the concerns that the Framers had about a president controlling everything,” she asked, why shouldn’t Congress’ judgment prevail?
Jackson returned repeatedly to the idea that Congress has the authority to create independent agencies, as well as to the idea that Congress oversees them. Justice Amy Coney Barrett portrayed independent agencies as “not answering to either the President or to Congress”; Justice Brett Kavanaugh called them “unaccountable” and worried that they cause “real-world problems for individual liberty,” though he didn’t name any. Sauer alleged a “power vacuum” in which independent agency commissioners exercise enormous control without answering to the president.
“I really don’t understand why the agencies aren’t answering to Congress,” Jackson said. “Congress established them and can eliminate them. Congress funds them and can stop. So to the extent that we’re concerned that there’s some sort of entity that is out of control and has no control, I guess I don’t understand that argument.”
Indeed, the entire oral argument was infused with contempt for Congress’ authority and democratic legitimacy. The Republican-appointees prefer to give the president unlimited power than to allow Congress to create the agencies it sees fit; and they see Congressional oversight not as part of its constitutional function but as a problem.
Finally, though the conservative justices have spent decades touting their originalist methodology—which seeks the answer to constitutional and statutory questions in historical analogues and the Constitution’s original public meaning—they almost completely ignored the actual history of independent agencies. Since the Roberts Court began to move rapidly toward the unitary executive theory, historians and legal scholars have gone back to the archives to see whether there’s actually historical evidence for eliminating independent agencies and giving the president unfettered removal power. It turns out there are lots of historical examples of independent agencies and restrictions on presidential removals going back to the Founding era—as multiple amicus briefs in this case laid out.
“Independent agencies have been around since the founding,” Sotomayor said. “The Sinking Fund, the War Commission—we’ve had independent agencies throughout our history. So this is not a modern contrivance.”
But the conservatives saw our status quo—in effect, in some form, for 250 years—as the real threat. Chief Justice Roberts, for example, worried that Congress might get power-hungry and decide to transform federal agencies like the Department of Education into independent agencies run by independent commissioners. That example is far-fetched at the moment: Congress created the department and now is sitting idly by as Trump unilaterally dismantles it. Nevertheless, this seemed a bigger worry for the conservative bloc than the actual, predictable consequences of letting Trump get his hands on every pocket of independence: further self-enrichment, retribution, chaos, and the other tragedies that stem from clowns running the circus.
This is what it looks like when Supreme Court justices are completely unburdened by history, the logical conclusions of their own reasoning, and the real-world consequences of their own actions. And we are all along for the ride.
2025-12-09 05:57:31
Alina Habba has finally stepped down as New Jersey’s lead federal prosecutor after a three-month court challenge found her appointment without Senate confirmation illegal.
The US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit concurred with a lower court ruling that Habba, formerly Trump’s personal attorney, was gifted the position of acting US attorney through a “novel”—and unlawful—“series of legal and personnel moves.”
Habba announced her resignation as acting US attorney for the District of New Jersey in a social media post Monday afternoon to “protect the stability and integrity of the office.” Habba, who helped defend Trump in his New York civil fraud case and defamation trials, has no experience as a prosecutor.
“But do not mistake compliance for surrender,” Habba wrote, announcing that she would continue to serve the Department of Justice as Attorney General Pam Bondi’s “Senior Advisor” for US attorneys.
It remains uncertain who will head the New Jersey US attorney’s office following Habba’s resignation.
Despite the earlier federal ruling on her position, Habba remained in her post after Bondi deemed her “Special Attorney to the Attorney General,” a title the White House has used in other attempts to force through other prosecutorial appointments without Senate confirmation.
Bondi wrote on X that the Department of Justice would “seek further review” of the decision against Habba and that she was “confident” it would be reversed. Bondi complained that “politicized judges” were pausing trials to “countermand the President’s choice of attorneys.”
Habba was only the first of Trump’s US attorneys to be embroiled in a court battle over their appointment. Judges have stated that circumventing Senate confirmation by placing acting US attorneys—and obvious Trump devotees—in lead prosecutor positions was illegal.
Lindsey Halligan, the US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, met the same fate last month. Halligan’s criminal cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James were subsequently dismissed. In September and October, respectively, the US attorneys in Nevada and the Central District of California were also found to have been appointed illegally.
In a Monday statement posted on X about Halligan, Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche accused the judges of conducting an “unconscionable campaign of bias and hostility.”
Habba’s resignation may indicate that the Trump administration is nevertheless beginning to see such appointments as a losing battle.
2025-12-09 05:01:54
Bruna Ferreira, the mother of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s nephew, has been released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody after a US immigration judge on Monday ordered her release on a $1,500 bond.
Ferreira, who was born in Brazil and still faces possible deportation, was arrested on November 12 in Massachusetts on the way to pick up her 11-year-old son from school and was sent to South Louisiana ICE Processing Center.
The White House has since attempted to villainize Ferreira as an absentee mother and a “criminal illegal alien” despite the lack of public records showing any criminal convictions. Ferreira stated in an exclusive interview with the Washington Post on Sunday that these were “disgusting” lies; she told the Post that she had even chosen Leavitt to be her son’s godmother.
The Department of Homeland Security declined to respond to questions about whether Ferreira’s release signaled any changes in policy regarding bond releases for detained undocumented immigrants. (DHS, under the Trump administration, has typically opposed such releases.) Spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin instead replied, “The facts remain [Ferreira] has a previous arrest for battery.”
Ferreira emigrated from Brazil with her parents when she was about 6 years old. She obtained temporary protection from deportation and work authorization through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals immigration program. But as my colleague Isabela Dias wrote in November, DACA recipients, who were long promised a safety net, are now being targeted by the Trump administration for deportation.
Those attacks include detention and more insidious methods. As Isabela reports, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services now excludes DACA recipients from coverage through the Affordable Care Act’s marketplace, and in July, the Department of Education launched an investigation into five universities over scholarships for students with DACA status.
2025-12-09 02:38:33
On Sunday, US lawmakers released the annual defense policy bill authorizing a record $901 billion in national defense spending in 2026. The bill was somehow $8 billion more than President Trump requested, and bans transgender women from competing in sports at military universities.
The 3,086-page bill states that the secretary of defense will ensure military academies do not permit a person “whose sex is male to participate in an athletic program or activity that is designated for women or girls.” The text codifies “sex” as “a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.”
The bill has already been negotiated between Republicans and Democrats and is set to go to a House vote this week, likely leaving little room for significant changes.
But the new version does drop the ban on Defense Department funding on gender-affirming surgeries. Previous versions passed by both the House and the Senate incorporated the ban.
The House bill approved in September also prohibited gender transition services for family members through the Exceptional Family Member Program: “No gender transition procedures, including surgery or medication, may be provided to a minor dependent child through an EFMP.”
Last year’s National Defense Authorization Act restricted TRICARE, the health care program that provides civilian health benefits for US military personnel, their dependents, and retirees, from covering “certain medical procedures for children that could result in sterilization.”
The NDAA is must-pass legislation as it sets the defense budget and determines the policies it will apply to each year. NDAA laws from previous fiscal years thus have a knock-on effect, opening the door for lawmakers to flood the new bill with anti-trans provisions that would likely not pass on their own and force Democrats to block them while on limited time.
The House bill that was passed in September contains several anti-LGBT amendments in addition to the ban on “gender transition procedures” for servicemembers’ children. Many of Rep. Nancy Mace’s (R-S.C.) proposed additions were adopted—including prohibiting coverage for “gender-related medical treatment,” defined to include puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgeries, as well as mental health care for transgender young people and requiring the use of single-sex facilities such as restrooms and locker rooms according to their “reproductive system.”
Every year’s NDAA will likely prompt discussions on what anti-transgender provisions could be forced through. As my colleagues Madison Pauly and Henry Carnell wrote in January, President Donald Trump is restricting access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth. This has led institutions like the NCAA and government departments such as the Department of Veterans Affairs to bow to his orders. The NDAA is just one piece of this coordinated effort.
2025-12-09 01:24:21
On Sunday, Palantir announced that the company, which counts Peter Thiel as its chairman, and is doing work for the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, will have a “Neurodivergent Fellowship.” The X post sharing this news noticeably did not have captions, making it inaccessible for some disabled people.
Neurodivergent people face barriers when it comes to employment in all industries, due to biases about disability and failure to give adequate accommodations. Disabled people can also very much participate in technofascism and also lateral ableism of other disabled people—as I previously reported, Elon Musk is a very strong example of this—and this fellowship will do nothing to break down barriers that neurodivergent people face.
Virginia Tech professor Ashley Shew, author of Against Technoableism, noted to me that some disabled people being seen as better than other disabled people is not new. Hans Asperger, after all, chose which autistic people were worth saving and which children were sent to their death under the Nazi regime.
“Disabled people know keenly the dangers of surveillance technology, about what it means to be reduced to data and misread, and the societal impetus to scrutinize our lives and lived expertise,” Shew told me. “It’s a terrible shame that disability gets the most celebration and investment when it is coopted by corporate and industrial interests.”
“Being a disabled token for a morally questionable industry is by no means a step toward disability liberation or true inclusion of any sort, but rather leads us in the other direction,” Shew added.
University of North Carolina at Charlotte assistant professor Damien P. Williams, who researches how technologies are impacted by values, concurs with Shew that this fellowship is very harmful.
“A ‘neurodivergent fellowship’ at a corporation like Palantir isn’t meaningful inclusion or representation so much as it’s an exercise in having an often punitively surveilled population be complicit in making platforms of weaponized surveillance, to build and be the systems and tools of their own and others’ oppression,” Williams said.
Looking at how the job is described, Seton Hall University assistant professor Jess Rauchberg—who researches the cultural impacts of digital media technologies— finds that the fellowship dives into harmful tropes of neurodivergent people.
“Some of the language the job call uses about neurodivergent people as ‘able to see past performative ideologies’ reinforces really dangerous rhetoric that disabled people aren’t human,” Rauchberg told me. “It also presents neurodivergent people using the supercrip trope: that these are disabled people whose ‘savant’ status makes them not like other disabled people, especially intellectually and developmentally disabled people.”
Shew, in general, feels “pretty gross about most neurodiversity hiring programs.” Shew notes that these programs tend to misunderstand the neurodivergence umbrella and focus on autism.
“These programs are rarely about thinking bigger about how to include people with a range of disabilities and neurotypes in all places and still reify impairment models in how they describe the hired workers, which too easily results in situations where people hired in this model cannot meaningfully advance and are seen in specific and limiting ways,” Shew continued.
2025-12-08 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Last month, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro withdrew from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI (pronounced “Reggie”), a cap-and-trade program that establishes a regional limit on carbon emissions from power plants located in the Northeast.
Here’s how RGGI works: Each year, credits allowing the power plants to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide, up to the cap, are auctioned off. The proceeds from these auctions go to RGGI member states, which can reinvest them into clean energy and consumer affordability programs. Crucially, the emissions cap gradually lowers over time, theoretically ensuring that total emissions continue on a downward trend.
Pennsylvania is a giant within the program, because it has higher power sector emissions than all of the other RGGI states—Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and the District of Columbia—combined, so Shapiro’s exit sent shockwaves through the system. The Democrat withdrew from the program as part of a compromise to convince Republicans in the legislature to pass the state’s budget, which has been delayed since June, forcing schools and public transportation to dip into rainy day funds or take on debt to support services.
“To add insult to injury here, we were about to have the answer from the [state Supreme Court]. And now we never will.”
As he signed the withdrawal bill, Shapiro said that state Republicans have used RGGI “as an excuse to stall substantive conversations about energy.” (Though Pennsylvania joined the regional pact in 2022, the move was immediately tied up in litigation, which was ongoing at the time of Shapiro’s withdrawal, meaning the state had yet to actually participate in the auctions.)
“Today, that excuse is gone,” Shapiro added. “It’s time to look forward—and I’m going to be aggressive about pushing for policies that create more jobs in the energy sector, bring more clean energy onto the grid, and reduce the cost of energy for Pennsylvanians.”
But some other Democrats and environmental advocates argue that the governor has essentially given away the store. “I would describe it as Faustian, except Faust got so much more out of his bargain with the devil,” Nikil Saval, a Democratic state senator, told Spotlight PA. Jackson Morris, senior state policy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that Shapiro lost a chance to claim credit for a substantial environmental victory during a potential presidential run, which he is rumored to be considering.
Democrats “basically got rolled,” said Morris. “The political calculus of all this is baffling.”
Pennsylvania first moved to join RGGI in 2019 through an executive action by then-governor Tom Wolf, a Democrat, but the program attracted pushback from Republicans immediately. A 2022 court order prevented the state from formally joining RGGI that year, and then the Commonwealth Court ruled Wolf’s executive action unconstitutional in 2023. That decision is currently being reconsidered by the state Supreme Court, where Democrats retained their majority in elections last month. But Shapiro’s move renders that process moot.
“To add insult to injury here,” said Morris, “we were about to have the answer from the court. And now we never will, because they gave up.”
“It’s not just that we fumbled the ball on the 1-yard line, but then [we] picked it up and ran it into the other end zone,” said Patrick McDonnell, president and CEO of the Pennsylvania environmental group PennFuture. (The governor’s office declined to speak with Grist on the record.)
RGGI has produced about $8.6 billion thus far for participating states. Virginia, fresh off the heels of Democratic governor-elect Abigail Spanberger’s victory, is poised to rejoin the program after being forced out by the current Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin. When Youngkin’s withdrawal was found to be unlawful in court, Spanberger campaigned on returning to the compact.
Some are more cautious in their criticism of Shapiro. “This decision [on RGGI] doesn’t feel final to me,” said Dallas Burtraw, a senior fellow at the research nonprofit Resources for the Future.
In early 2025, Shapiro unveiled his “Lightning Plan,” a jobs-and-energy proposal that included something called the Pennsylvania Climate Emissions Reduction program. Known as PACER, it’s essentially a Pennsylvania-specific version of RGGI—a cap-and-trade program that gradually reduces emissions, creates tradable carbon credits that would (theoretically) be interchangeable with those of RGGI member states, and reinvests the profits toward lowering consumer electricity costs. “Pennsylvania is an elephant compared to the rest of RGGI,” said Burtraw, explaining the reasons that the state would want to create its own program and later link it to RGGI.
“It would have been amazing to see Pennsylvania join RGGI,” he said. “But I think that we might be setting down a pathway that’s turned out for the better.”
Others are less convinced. Joining RGGI was feasible, they say, only because it was implemented through executive action. The odds of anything like PACER making it through the state’s Republican-controlled senate are slim.
“Pennsylvanians need and deserve serious plans to curb greenhouse gas emissions, lower energy bills, and deliver revenue,” said state Senator Saval in a statement to Grist. “So far, senate Republicans have shown little interest in even meager efforts to do any of this. It’s hard to imagine the abrogation of RGGI would help them, as it were, to find religion on this front.”
