The Supreme Court has erased one of the twentieth century’s most consequential administrative-law precedents, and the ruling reaches directly into the machinery that writes and enforces gun policy. On June 29, 2026, the Court decided Trump v. Slaughter, No. 25-332, 609 U.S. ___ (2026), overruling Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, 295 U.S. 602 (1935), the 1935 decision that had shielded commissioners of “independent” federal agencies from removal by the President. The vote was 6-3, with Chief Justice Roberts writing for the majority, joined by Justices Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett; Justice Thomas joined all but one section. Justice Sotomayor dissented, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson.
How Slaughter Got to the Supreme Court
President Trump removed Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter by email on March 18, 2025, without stating cause, as Humphrey’s Executor required. Slaughter sued, and a federal district court reinstated her that July. A D.C. Circuit panel declined to stay the reinstatement, holding that the government had no likelihood of success on appeal given controlling and directly on-point Supreme Court precedent in Humphrey’s Executor. Chief Justice Roberts issued an administrative stay in September 2025, and the full Court later granted the government’s application pending its plenary review. That review culminated in this week’s merits decision, which strips the FTC’s commissioners of their statutory for-cause removal protection altogether. Justice Roberts did not mince words: “Humphrey’s framework, in short, has not withstood the test of time,” he wrote, adding, “if anything more is left of Humphrey’s, we overrule it.”
No Fourth Branch of Government
My constitutional read of this case starts with a structural point I have made on this channel for years: the Constitution recognizes exactly three branches of government. Article I creates Congress. Article II creates the presidency. Article III creates the judiciary. There is no Article IV. Yet for ninety years, Humphrey’s Executor allowed Congress to carve out multi-member commissions — the FTC among them — whose members could not be fired by the President even though they sat squarely inside the executive branch. That arrangement manufactured a fourth branch in all but name: unelected officials exercising rulemaking, enforcement, and adjudicatory power while answering to no one who stands for election.
Chief Justice Roberts framed the stakes in exactly those terms, opening his opinion with the Framers’ own reasoning:
“Nearly 250 years ago, the Framers decided to vest ‘the executive Power’ in one person — ‘a President of the United States of America.’”
The FTC, Roberts noted, has accumulated “vast rulemaking, enforcement, and adjudicatory powers under more than 80 statutes” since its creation in 1914, wielded by five commissioners serving seven-year terms removable only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” That statutory shield, the Court held, is “contrary to the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution.”
Taft’s Rule: You Cannot Fire What You Cannot Choose
The Court’s reasoning traces back further than 1935, to Chief Justice (and former President) William Howard Taft’s opinion in Myers v. United States, 272 U.S. 52 (1926). “Because no one can execute the laws alone and unaided,” the Chief Justice quoted Taft as explaining, the President “must be permitted to select those who act for him and remove those for whom he cannot continue to be responsible.” The logic is straightforward and, to my mind, unanswerable: a President cannot faithfully execute the laws, as Article II commands, if he is stuck employing subordinates who are actively working against his agenda. An organization cannot function, whether it is a restaurant or the federal government, if a portion of the staff is rooting for it to fail and cannot be shown the door.
Why This Matters for Gun Owners
The immediate holding governs the FTC and, by the dissent’s own account, threatens the same for-cause removal shield at agencies like FERC, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But the constitutional principle animating Slaughter runs directly through the Second Amendment fight. I have spent years documenting how career officials embedded in ATF and the Department of Justice have slow-walked or subverted a President’s stated gun-rights priorities. Most of those positions were always at-will and were never protected by Humphrey’s Executor in the first place — this decision does not change their removability. What it does is confirm, unambiguously and from the Court’s own pen, the constitutional baseline that every officer inside the executive branch answers to the President the people elected, not to his own policy preferences. When an anti-gun bureaucrat undermines that agenda, accountability now runs to exactly one desk. That is precisely how the Framers designed it.
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.