WASHINGTON — Chief Justice John Roberts has led the Supreme Court 's conservative majority on a steady march of increasing the power of the presidency, starting well before Donald Trump's time in the White House.
The justices could take the next step in a case being argued Monday that calls for a unanimous 90-year-old decision limiting executive authority to be overturned.
The court's conservatives, liberal Justice Elena Kagan noted in September, seem to be ''raring to take that action.''
They already have allowed Trump, in the opening months of the Republican's second term, to fire almost everyone he has wanted, despite the court's 1935 decision in Humphrey's Executor that prohibits the president from removing the heads of independent agencies without cause.
The officials include Rebecca Slaughter, whose firing from the Federal Trade Commission is at issue in the current case, as well as officials from the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
The only officials who have so far survived efforts to remove them are Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor, and Shira Perlmutter, a copyright official with the Library of Congress. The court already has suggested that it will view the Fed differently from other independent agencies, and Trump has said he wants her out because of allegations of mortgage fraud. Cook says she did nothing wrong.
Humphrey's Executor has long been a target of the conservative legal movement that has embraced an expansive view of presidential power known as the unitary executive.
The case before the high court involves the same agency, the FTC, that was at issue in 1935. The justices established that presidents — Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt at the time — could not fire the appointed leaders of the alphabet soup of federal agencies without cause.
