Another day, another deep state defeat at the hands of the United States Supreme Court. On July 23, 2025, the Court handed President Trump a decisive 6–3 victory in Trump v. Boyle, No. 25A11 — staying a lower court order that would have forced three fired Consumer Product Safety Commission commissioners back into their jobs. The Fourth Circuit had unanimously refused to block that reinstatement. The Supreme Court disagreed, and the consequences reach far beyond consumer product safety.
What Trump v. Boyle Is Actually About
President Trump fired three Democratic CPSC commissioners — Mary Boyle, Alexander Hoehn-Saric, and Richard Trumka Jr. — in May 2025. A federal district judge in Maryland ordered them reinstated, reasoning that a federal statute only permits removal “for cause.” The Fourth Circuit affirmed. Trump applied for a stay at the Supreme Court, and the six-justice conservative majority granted it in short order.
The majority’s reasoning was blunt: this case is “squarely controlled” by Trump v. Wilcox, the Court’s May 22, 2025 stay that already permitted Trump to remove members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board. The CPSC, like the NLRB, “exercises executive power.” Under Article II of the Constitution, executive power is vested in the President — singular. Not in a commission. Not in an independent board shielded from presidential oversight. The President.
The government, the majority explained, “faces greater risk of harm from an order allowing a removed officer to continue exercising the executive power than a wrongly removed officer faces from being unable to perform her statutory duty.” Game, set, match.
There Is No Such Thing as a “Fourth Branch”
Justice Kagan filed a dissent, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, and she was not shy about her frustration. She wrote that the majority had used “its emergency docket to destroy the independence of an independent agency as established by Congress.”
With respect, that dissent reveals a fundamental constitutional error. My read is this: there is no such thing as an independent executive agency truly independent from the President. Article I creates Congress. Article II creates the presidency. Article III creates the courts. That is our three-branch constitutional architecture — full stop. Congress cannot manufacture a fourth branch of government by statute and call it “independent.” When an agency exercises executive power, it does so under the President’s authority, period.
What Kagan’s dissent is really lamenting is that we the people — through elections — get to have a say over these agencies. When voters elect a president, they expect that president to actually control the executive branch. The “independence” she is defending is independence from democratic accountability. I find that argument backwards as a constitutional matter.
And note well: Justice Amy Coney Barrett is in that 6–3 majority. For those who were skeptical of her appointment, Trump v. Boyle is another data point. She is following the constitutional text, as a good originalist should.
Humphrey’s Executor Is on Life Support
Here is where my read on Boyle gets genuinely exciting for Second Amendment purposes. At the core of this entire line of cases sits Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, 295 U.S. 602 (1935) — a Depression-era FDR-era precedent holding that Congress can insulate multi-member independent agency commissioners from presidential removal without cause.
The Wilcox stay, now confirmed and extended by Boyle, is effectively dismantling Humphrey’s Executor brick by brick. The Court has not formally overruled it yet — that moment may come in Trump v. Slaughter, the FTC removal case currently working its way to a merits decision — but every stay, every per curiam order in this line says the same thing: the president controls the executive branch.
Why does that matter for the Second Amendment? Because Humphrey’s Executor is a 1935 precedent. The National Firearms Act is a 1934 statute. Both are FDR-era relics rooted in an era when the Supreme Court was tolerating dramatic constitutional distortions to accommodate the New Deal. If this Court is willing — and it clearly is — to bulldoze the constitutional errors of the 1930s when it comes to executive power, I have been arguing for years that the same approach applies to New Deal–era gun laws. The NFA, the constitutional framework propping it up, the whole apparatus — it all rests on the same era’s compromised foundations.
What Comes Next
The Boyle stay is not a final merits ruling. The case will work its way through the Fourth Circuit and, most likely, back to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, Trump v. Slaughter — the FTC commissioner case where the Court may formally lay Humphrey’s Executor to rest — is expected to produce a full merits decision. When it does, I expect it to be another 6–3 ruling with a sweeping opinion about Article II’s Vesting Clause.
For the deep state, for unelected bureaucrats insulated from presidential control, the math is clear. There are six justices who believe the constitutional text means what it says: the executive power shall be vested in a President. Not in a commission. Not in a board. The President.
That is a constitutional framework that opens more doors than just the door to the CPSC’s conference room.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.