The Supreme Court Is Set to Pick Financial Predators Over the People

This does not appear to have deterred the justices. If anything, it may have encouraged them. Sauer expressed concern at one point about the “real-world consequences” of agencies “exercising enormous governmental authority with a great deal of control over individuals and small and large businesses and so forth” if they “ultimately do not answer to the president.” It should be the president, Sauer argued, who gets to wield the FTC’s power over mergers and antitrust, or the SEC’s control over financial regulations, or the NLRB’s power to resolve labor-management disputes.

That will be an enormous boon to the companies that have cozied up to Trump, whether by donating millions of dollars to his campaign, or by doing his bidding on conservative culture-war projects, or by funding an illegal White House ballroom, or so on. It will also be helpful to any business that thrives in a weaker regulatory environment by grifting Americans outright, or by exploiting the non-enforcement of labor laws, consumer-protection laws, and securities laws. Scammers and predators and white collar criminals of all varities shall inevitably rejoice when this decision is handed down.

All of that would be dangerous for Americans’ lives, liberties, and pursuits of happiness, one would think. Perhaps that is why Congress structured these agencies to keep their distance from more easily corruptible officials in the executive and legislative branches. Unfortunately, Kavanaugh and his colleagues have a different conception of “liberty” in mind: one where “billion-dollar industries” are at liberty to conspire with a corrupt president to exploit and abuse the rest of us. As a result, Trump v. Slaughter is poised to be a landmark step on this country’s turn away from democratic governance and good government in favor of oligarchy and despotism.