BREAKING: Supreme Court Overturns the Case That Created the Deep State
With Humphrey's Executor gone, the Deep State, “independent” power beyond the voters’ reach, and FDR's 90-year coup are all greatly endangered, while Article 2, Section 1 is re-established.
by Rod D. Martin
June 29, 2026
This morning, in a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court ruled that the President may fire FTC commissioners at will, overruling Humphrey's Executor and holding that the FTC's for-cause removal protections violate the Constitution's separation of powers.
For the first time in 90 years, Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution is restored. The blow to the Deep State is crippling.
The case is Trump v. Slaughter, which you can read in full here. But the essential portion is this, from page 35-36: “Our Constitution creates three branches, but only one President. That President is not all-powerful — not by any means. But he is not impotent either. He and he alone is vested with ‘the executive Power’ of the United States.”
The majority continued: “If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, we overrule it.”
Trump v. Slaughter squarely asked the Supreme Court to admit what has been obvious since 1935: Humphrey’s Executor was a constitutional disaster. If you’ve heard of the case, you might think it’s about Trump firing an FTC commissioner. That’s not the question.
The real question is: Do we still have a Constitution, or do we have a permanent ruling class — credentialed, insulated, and effectively unfireable — running the country while elections serve as a ceremonial change of figureheads? Or will we continue to have an unconstitutional fourth branch of government, run by “experts,” insulated from the voters, and wielding coercive power without democratic accountability?
Or to put that another way, does the Constitution’s Article 2, Section 1 have any meaning? Today we got that answer.
Some point to the related decision this morning in Trump v. Cook as a statement that the Court isn’t willing to go as far as all that. They should take heart. The Court’s ruling is only valid while the underlying litigation is pending, presumably in deference to longstanding Beltway and Washington sensibilities about the Federal Reserve. But the logic of Slaughter is clear, and while there may very well be distinguishing circumstances that must be considered in Cook’s case, she’s about to be unemployed.
I have been saying for a very long time that if the Court is serious about dismantling the legal architecture of the administrative state — as it was when it finally killed the awful Chevron decision in Loper Bright—then it cannot stop halfway. Chevron was one pillar. Humphrey’s is another. Kill one and keep the other and the Deep State survives, merely inconvenienced. Kill both — as the Court has now done — and real change becomes possible.
The Mistake That Made a Fourth Branch
In 1935, the Court faced a simple problem. Franklin Roosevelt fired another FTC commissioner, William Humphrey. Congress had written a statute trying to prevent that — saying commissioners could be removed only “for cause,” such as malfeasance. The commissioner died; his estate sued for back pay; and a very different Court chose the bureaucracy over the elected executive.
To justify that outcome, the justices did something extraordinary: they invented a category of power that does not exist anywhere in the Constitution. They described the FTC as a “body of experts,” exercising “quasi-legislative” and “quasi-judicial” powers — therefore, not really executive, and therefore not truly subject to the President’s removal power.
This was a constitutional sleight of hand. The FTC doesn’t just write binding rules. It investigates. It prosecutes. It punishes. Those are executive functions, whether you label them “quasi” or “semi” or “expert.” “Executive” means executing the law — using the state’s coercive power against citizens. That is exactly what the FTC does.
Ask yourself: if the FTC doesn’t fall under the Executive Branch, under which branch should it fall? You actually have to pick one, and the Constitution gives you only one choice. If the agency doesn’t fall within the Constitution’s boundaries, it’s a separate, unconstitutional form of government.
And that’s exactly how most of government has operated for nearly a century.
The Founders built a system where you can trace responsibility. Congress writes laws. Courts interpret and apply them. The President executes them. And because the President is a single person elected by the whole nation, accountability is direct: if the executive branch governs badly, the people can remove its head.
As the Court noted, that doesn’t mean the President is a king. He is checked by Congress, checked by courts, checked by federalism, checked by elections. But he is in charge of execution. That is the bargain. That is what “The executive Power shall be vested in a President” means. It’s also why we abandoned the Articles of Confederation for the system the Founders created.
If Presidents can’t fire bureaucrats, you have no say over them. But they have plenty of say over you: government yes, but not by the consent of the governed. The executive power has been vested in them, not the elected President. And when the voters cannot fire the people governing them — any and all of them, albeit indirectly through elections — you are not governing yourselves. You are being governed.
Ruled, actually.
That is why this question sits at the center of everything I’ve written about the Deep State, and Trump’s counterrevolution against it: elections have to matter. And if elections do not actually change who wields power, they are just theater.
So what did Humphrey’s Executor really do?
