The Supreme Court just gave Donald Trump the power to fire almost any watchdog in Washington who crosses him.
For 90 years, the two dozen or so agencies Congress built were meant to be independent of the president. Now they answer to him, and he can fire anyone inside them who won’t do what he wants. Justice Sotomayor said the majority gave the president a power no English king ever held.
Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, who voted to give Trump this power, also warned how it would be used. He pointed at Trump’s own FCC, which leaned on ABC over a Jimmy Kimmel monologue. A company out of favor might escape one agency, he wrote, but the same White House now controls them all, and almost no one survives a fight coordinated by a single man with that much power.
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