When the Supreme Court overturns a 91-year precedent and rules that the president may fire members of independent agencies at will — the FTC, FCC, NLRB, and potentially the Federal Reserve — what do religious traditions and the Constitution say about concentrating that much power in one person?
<em>Humphrey's Executor</em> was one of the load-bearing walls of the modern administrative state — the case that let Congress design agencies (the Fed, the FTC, the FCC, the SEC, the NLRB) whose technical judgments would not turn with every election. The Court's 6-3 decision to remove that wall is a serious exercise of constitutional interpretation, made on real Article II grounds. It is also, at once, a very large expansion of what one president can decide alone. Religious traditions do not oppose executive authority; they oppose executive authority without check. The question the ruling raises — whether monetary policy, antitrust enforcement, and communications regulation are the kinds of decisions we want a single official to be able to reset every four years — is one every future administration of either party will now inherit. The founders wrote checks into the design because they did not trust anyone with too much of the power at once. That instinct did not begin with them, and it did not end with 1935.
Religious perspectives
Religious traditions have thought unusually carefully about concentrated power — not by opposing authority as such, but by insisting on the structures that keep it accountable and prevent it from becoming, in their word, tyranny.
Judaism: The Torah's "law of the king" (Deuteronomy 17:14-20) sets structural limits on royal power before the king is even installed — he must not "multiply horses," "multiply wives," or "greatly multiply silver and gold" — because the tradition understood, from long experience, that a ruler with no counterweights becomes something other than a servant of the people. The prophet Samuel's warning about kingship (1 Samuel 8:11-18) is the fullest biblical description of what happens when authority is consolidated: "He will take your sons... he will take your daughters... he will take a tenth of your grain... he will take the best of your fields." The verb "take" is repeated with prophetic force. The concern is not that a leader has some power; it is that unchecked power grows.
Christianity: Jesus' teaching on authority inverts the natural hierarchy: "You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you" (Mark 10:42-43). The Christian political tradition, from Augustine through Aquinas through the American founding's Reformed influences, has consistently favored the dispersal of authority — because concentrated power is prone to exactly the abuses those traditions identify as sinful.
Islam: Classical Islamic political theory places a duty of consultation (shura) on the ruler and treats the concentration of unchecked power as a corruption (fasad) that unmakes legitimate rule. The Quran's repeated affirmations of justice (adl) are matched by warnings against those who make themselves "haughty in the land" (28:39, 40:35) — a phrase used precisely for rulers who acknowledge no accountability.
Buddhism: The just-king tradition (cakravartin) holds that legitimate rulers govern through restraint — over their own appetites, over the reach of their office, and over the temptation to override advisors. A ruler who consolidates authority against his advisors has, in this framework, ceased to be the ruler the tradition describes and become the one it warns against.
The honest counterweight: Religious traditions do not oppose executive authority as such. A community needs someone who can decide and act. The traditions' concern is not with authority but with authority that has escaped the checks the community placed on it. A president who can fire independent regulators at will is not, by that fact alone, a tyrant; but he is, by that fact, closer to unchecked than the founders intended.
Constitutional & legal framework
The Supreme Court's June 29, 2026 ruling in Trump v. Slaughter overturned Humphrey's Executor v. United States (1935), a 91-year precedent that had allowed Congress to protect members of independent multi-member commissions from at-will presidential removal. The 6-3 decision is one of the most consequential structural rulings of the modern era.
The precedent: In 1935, a unanimous Supreme Court held that the president could not fire Federal Trade Commissioner William Humphrey without cause — because Congress had designed the FTC as an independent, quasi-judicial body whose members served fixed terms and could be removed only for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance." Humphrey's Executor became the constitutional foundation for the modern independent-agency structure: the FCC, the FTC, the SEC, the NLRB, the Federal Reserve, and dozens of other bodies that operate at arm's length from short-term political control.
The March 2025 firing: On his first day back in office, President Trump began removing Democratic commissioners from independent agencies, including FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter. Slaughter challenged the removal, citing the FTC's statutory for-cause protection. Lower courts split; the Supreme Court took the case.
The 2026 ruling: Justice Alito wrote for the majority, joined by the Chief Justice and Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. The opinion rests on the "unitary executive" reading of Article II: because Article II vests "the executive Power" in the president, officers who exercise executive power must be removable by him. The majority treated the FTC's for-cause protection as an intrusion on that vesting, and held that Humphrey's Executor had misread Article II from the start. Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissented, arguing that Congress's power under Article I to structure the agencies it creates has always included the power to shield technical decisions — antitrust, communications, monetary policy — from immediate political pressure.
What it means: The ruling reaches, in principle, every multi-member independent commission — the FCC, the SEC, the NLRB, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and others. The majority explicitly left open whether the Federal Reserve's structure survives, citing its "unique historical position"; the dissent noted that "unique historical position" is a phrase without a legal definition and that markets and mortgage rates depend on whether the answer is a real doctrine or a temporary politeness.
The honest other side: The unitary-executive reading is a serious constitutional argument, not a partisan invention. Independent agencies have long raised real questions about accountability — commissioners are unelected, difficult to remove, and make consequential rules that affect the whole economy. If accountability runs through the president, then insulating commissioners from him is in tension with the constitutional design. Reasonable people can hold that view. What the ruling cannot claim is that it leaves the branches of government where the founders left them; it does not.
See: Article II, Section 1 → | Humphrey's Executor v. United States (1935) →
Sources cited:BibleBuddhismConstitutionSupreme Court