The Supreme Court of the United States yesterday heard oral arguments in Trump v. Slaughter, and while the coverage of the case itself indicates that the result is a foregone conclusion in Trump’s favor, one clip that’s making the rounds has less to do with the case and more to do with the competency or partisanship of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Before getting into specifics on that, it’s important to know what this case is about and what is likely to happen in the end.
According to most reports, the court seems likely to allow the White House to fire a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for what has been framed as “policy reasons.” Opponents of the administration and Trump’s critics in the media characterize this as “rolling back 90 years of legal precedent that had prevented at-will removal of independent agency officials in a decision that would expand presidential power.”
SCOTUSblog put it differently:
During two and a half hours of argument in the case of Trump v. Slaughter, a solid majority of the justices appeared to agree with the Trump administration that a law prohibiting the president from firing FTC commissioners except in cases of ‘inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office’ violates the constitutional separation of powers between the three branches of government. And although several justices expressed skepticism about a 90-year-old case, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, upholding that law, it was less clear that there was a majority ready to overrule it.
Most of the reporting on this case concurs that a ruling in Trump’s favor will increase presidential power over so-called “independent agencies,” but no one is even touching the question of whether that’s a bad thing. Anyone who’s familiar with Washington knows that these agencies aren’t actually independent. Agency members are beholden to the people who put them there, usually Democrats who have no problems with bending the system to their will, and then hiding behind questionable laws and regulations to keep their deep state operatives entrenched in the bureaucracy.
This pattern has only survived because a milquetoast Republican party has never really forced its hand. Now, Trump is doing just that.
According to SCOTUSblog, since returning to the White House, the Trump administration has removed “members of the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The Supreme Court has already allowed those firings to take effect in proceedings on its interim docket, but the court’s ruling in the case of FTC commissioner Rebecca Slaughter will provide a more definitive ruling on the legality of those firings.”
In this context, Justice Jackson delivered an impassioned attack on Trump’s case and in favor of preserving the deep state as much as possible.
SCOTUS: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson told the Court that presidents should not be able to fire the PhDs & experts who run the government. She even argued presidents should avoid control over transportation & the economy.
— @amuse (@amuse) December 8, 2025
In a remarkable exchange in Trump v Slaughter, Justice… pic.twitter.com/sXQesOSdKG
You don’t have to be a lawyer to listen to or read Jackson’s words to find the flaws in her logic. Let’s start at the top:
Some issues, some lives, some areas, should be handled in this way by nonpartisan experts. That congress is saying that expertise matters with respect to aspects of the economy, and transportation, and various independent agencies that we have. And so, having the president come in and fire all the scientists, and the doctors, and the economists, and the Ph.D.’s, and replacing them with loyalists, and people who don’t know anything, is actually not in the best interest of the citizens of the United States,” said Jackson to Trump’s attorneys.
The problem with this is that it assumes these political appointees are independent experts with objective views of the subject matter, regardless of who’s in the Oval Office. To believe this is to ignore the realities of the federal government for its entire history.
Jackson also plays the credentialism game here, assuming that if you have a Ph.D., your judgment and policymaking are (or should be) unquestioned. Maybe she really believes that. Remember this gem from her confirmation hearings?
🚨🚨 WATCH: Low IQ Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, when asked to provide a definition for the word “woman”, was unable to do so. Her exact words were “I can’t… I’m not a biologist.” Now the last I checked it doesn’t take a law degree to be able to define what a… pic.twitter.com/1MvMCyGWB0
— Joshua Hall (@JoshHall2024) November 29, 2025
In yesterday’s proceedings, Jackson was not finished. She maintained that in this case, “These issues should not be in presidential control. So can you speak to me about the danger of allowing in these various areas the president to actually control the transportation board, and potentially the Federal Reserve, and all these other independent agencies. In these particular areas we would like to have independence. We don’t want the president controlling.”
The fact is that the president controls these entities to an extent. That’s why he has the power to appoint certain members. While these agencies don’t report directly to the president on the organizational chart, it’s a given that these agencies’ decisions tend to reflect the administration in power. Jackson didn’t have an issue with this when Joe Biden was president.
And then there was this. Somehow, Jackson found a way to insert the leftist propaganda concept of “No Kings” into her comments when she said, “one would think under our constitutional design, given the history of the monarchy and the concerns that the framers had about the president controlling everything, that in the clash between those two, Congress’s view that we should be able to have independence with respect to certain issues should take precedence.”
Really? Really, Justice Jackson?
For starters, this is just a word salad spiced up with high-brow words like “framers” and “constitutional design.” But it’s quite cringe to hear her use a weak propagandist’s messaging theme, “No Kings,” to make a point from the bench. Is she really suggesting, as a member of a coequal branch of government, that Trump is a monarch or that he could ever be one?
One other peeve of mine with Jackson’s comments is how imprecise they are. Not just legally, but linguistically. She repeatedly talks about how we don’t want “the president controlling everything.”
What does she even mean by that? We elect a president to run the federal government. That assumes he will have control over a hell of a lot of stuff. In fact, our system is designed to give him power, but no one has said he should “control everything.” That’s just Jackson doing some leftist projection, and it sounds pedestrian coming from a Supreme Court justice.
Ketanji Brown Jackson Argues Presidents Shouldn’t Be Allowed to Fire Bureaucrats Running Independent Agencies — Justice Brett Kavanaugh Shreds Her Argument https://t.co/a7sI5jITCJ #gatewaypundit via @gatewaypundit
— PatPeters,PhD. (@PatVPeters) December 9, 2025
I’d be interested in your thoughts on this, because I really can’t tell. Is she that mediocre of a legal mind, or is she so ideological and so brainwashed by leftism that she really thinks her job is to push an agenda over determining the most fair and consistent application of the law of the land?
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