Christian Employers Alliance Backs Trump’s FTC Firings
Executive power ultimately rests with the president, and firing subordinate officers is the most direct method of exercising this power, so President Donald Trump was within his right to fire FTC Commissioners Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, the Christian Employers Alliance argued in a brief with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Thursday.
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The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Humphrey’s Executor is limited to multi-member agencies that lack “substantial executive power,” so it doesn’t apply to the modern FTC, the Christian group argued: “The President lawfully removed Slaughter and Bedoya from their offices in the executive branch. The President must have the power to control any exercise of the Article II executive power."
Protect Democracy special counsel Amit Agarwal, who is representing Slaughter and Bedoya, argued against Trump’s case from a conservative viewpoint in a Wednesday opinion piece. “American democracy and prosperity are already suffering from an excess of executive power,” he wrote. “The last thing we need is a judicial revolution that would hand vast new powers to the president over Congress’s explicit and longstanding objection.”