The Supreme Court's 6-3 conservative majority reversed 91 years of precedent and ruled Trump can fire FTC commissioners and leaders of other independent agencies without cause.
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At 24:43 · chapter starts 24:20
The biggest ruling of the term gets its full treatment here. In a 6-3 decision, the conservative Supreme Court majority reversed 91 years of precedent established in Humphrey's Executor and ruled that Trump can fire FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter — and by extension, leaders of the SEC, Consumer Product Safety Commission, EEOC, NLRB, and other independent agencies — without any stated reason [1] — Tommy Vietor "The Supreme Court's 6-3 conservative majority reversed 91 years of precedent, ruling Trump can fire FTC commissioners and leaders of other …" 24:20 . Tommy Vietor explains the practical implication: the president can also simply strip agencies of their quorum, preventing them from meeting at all. The Federal Reserve gets a carve-out in a 5-4 decision — even the appearance of political pressure on monetary policy could destroy faith in the U.S. economy, the court reasoned — but Lisa Cook's job protection is precarious: the ruling said Trump simply didn't go through the proper process, and he can try again with stated cause. Jon Lovett makes the key structural argument: this isn't just expanding executive power, it's stealing power Congress explicitly delegated to these quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial bodies. The hosts debate whether a future Democratic president would benefit, with Lovett warning that Gorsuch's concurrence signals the court would just strike down agencies' powers entirely if a Democrat tried to use them. Jon Favreau's bottom line: as long as this Supreme Court majority holds, there are no independent agencies except potentially the Fed.
The Supreme Court's 6-3 conservative majority reversed 91 years of precedent, ruling Trump can fire FTC commissioners and leaders of other independent agencies without cause. The president can now paralyze these bodies by stripping their quorums. The Fed alone gets a carve-out — because even the appearance of political pressure on monetary policy could destroy economic faith.
The FTC wasn't just an executive agency — Congress delegated some of its own legislative and judicial authority to it. The Supreme Court's ruling doesn't just expand presidential power; it transfers power that Congress had explicitly granted away from the legislature. Sotomayor and Kagan's dissent makes this case forcefully.
In a 5-4 ruling where John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett sided with the liberals, the Supreme Court upheld Mississippi's law counting mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day but received afterward. The decision protects similar policies in roughly 30 states. But as Tommy Vietor noted, the assault on voting rights will keep coming — this chip just didn't come undone.
A total of 8 states have filed lawsuits against social media platforms, including an ongoing case in Tennessee, using product liability and public nuisance theories to seek accountability.
France built 56 nuclear plants in the 1970s and now has the cheapest energy in Europe, making it independent of Russian or Middle Eastern energy geopolitics.
Estonia has a single tax form, a law preventing the government from asking citizens for the same information twice, and a flat rate of tax — enabling competitive taxation.
Portugal's Lisbon, once a city with a major heroin problem, legalised drugs and redirected enforcement spending into rehabilitation and housing, dramatically reducing crime.
The first Boland Amendment banning CIA and Defense Department funds for the Contras passed the House unanimously — yet the Reagan administration ignored it.
Over just two years, Saudi Arabia alone donated $32 million to the Contra rebels, giving loosely affiliated factions millions they had no way to spend on arms.
The National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty raised $6.3 million for the Contras but only $3.3 million reached them — a shockingly low 52% program expense rate.
Richard Secord and Albert Hakim marked up their arms shipments to the Contras by as much as 300%, making enormous personal profits from the covert operation.
Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, tapped to run the entire covert Contra support operation, had no prior experience in covert operations whatsoever — he was learning as he went.
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