(Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court said on Friday it will hear arguments on December 8 concerning the legality of President Donald Trump’s firing of a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission in a major case that tests the scope of presidential power over government agencies designed by Congress to be independent.
The court in September took up the case while also allowing Trump to terminate Rebecca Slaughter, who had sued to challenge Trump’s action. The court lifted a judge’s order that had shielded Slaughter from being dismissed from the consumer protection and antitrust agency before her term expires in 2029.
The stakes of the case are high as it could lead to the justices overruling a 90-year-old precedent upholding job protections put in place by Congress to give the heads of certain federal agencies a degree of independence from presidential control.
The court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Its three liberal justices dissented from the court’s order letting Trump remove Slaughter while the case proceeds.
Federal law permits a president to remove FTC commissioners only for cause – such as inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office – but not for policy differences. Similar protections cover officials at other independent agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board.
Slaughter was one of two Democratic commissioners who Trump moved to fire in March. The firings drew sharp criticism from Democratic senators and antimonopoly groups concerned that the move was designed to eliminate opposition within the agency to big corporations.
Washington-based U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan in July blocked Trump’s firing of Slaughter, rejecting his administration’s arguments that the tenure protections unlawfully encroach on presidential power. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in September kept the judge’s ruling in place.
The lower courts ruled that the statutory protections shielding FTC members from being removed without cause conform with the U.S. Constitution in light of the 1935 Supreme Court precedent in a case called Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. In that case, the court ruled that a president lacks unfettered power to remove FTC commissioners, faulting then-President Franklin Roosevelt’s firing of an FTC commissioner for policy differences.
The Supreme Court in January is due to hear separate arguments over Trump’s attempt to remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, though the justices left her in the post for now. That case involves the first-ever bid by a president to fire a Fed official as he challenges the central bank’s independence.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)
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