Turning the government’s power to his own ends

He fired officials the law protected, and the Supreme Court overturned 90 years of precedent to let him.

Congress made agencies like the Federal Trade Commission independent, with members removable only for cause. He fired two Democratic commissioners anyway. To uphold it, the Supreme Court's conservative majority overruled a unanimous 90-year-old precedent 6–3. Justice Sotomayor wrote that the Court “undoes centuries of political practice” and hands the president “a power unknown even to the English Crown.”

SourcesThe decision, SCOTUSblog · What it means, NPR

He fired officials the law protected, and the Supreme Court overturned 90 years of precedent to let him.
More on this
His Homeland Security signed a $464 million no-bid contract for planes it said it urgently needed to deport people, then let them sit parked for months, turned three into luxury jets, and lent one to the FBI director.His DHS waived dozens of laws to bulldoze a border wall through Big Bend National Park, over a cease-and-desist from Texas’s Republican land commissioner and the objections of seven former park superintendents.He ordered the Navy to rip out the electromagnetic catapults on its newest carriers and go back to 1950s steam, at a cost of billions, just as China put the very same technology to sea.

← Back to the full record