This morning the Supreme Court will hear Trump v. Cook, a case that began with an unprecedented move: President Trump fired Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. As usual, lower courts blocked him.
The press is framing this as a fight about “central bank independence” and even inflation fears. But that deliberately misses the real question at stake:
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?
Trump v. Cook is not an isolated dispute. It is the Federal Reserve chapter in the same story the Court already confronted last month in Trump v. Slaughter, the FTC case that squarely asks the Supreme Court to admit what has been obvious since 1935: Humphrey’s Executor was a constitutional disaster.
Simply put, today’s argument is about whether the Supreme Court will continue to bless 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?
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.
The Mistake That Made a Fourth Branch
In 1935, the Court faced a simple problem. Franklin Roosevelt fired an FTC commissioner.
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 the 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: if it 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.
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?
It created a template.
Somehow Congress could now just carve out pieces of executive power and lodge them in agencies designed to be insulated from the elected executive.
Checks? Balances? Gone: one branch was allowed to gut another.
The President would still be blamed for “the government,” but he could not control the bureaucrats actually wielding the government’s force.
The voters could change the face in the Oval Office — but the permanent apparatus would remain, intact, unchanged, and unaccountably powerful.
That is the Deep State in a sentence.
And why weren’t Democrats outraged at this draconian restriction on FDR’s power. Because it didn’t actually restrict his power, just that of all presidents after.
It was Roosevelt creating all these agencies. He filled them with Democrats. They chose the vast majority of their own replacements, down to the present day.
And that’s why elections rarely seem to change things: we’ve lived under de facto one-party rule for nearly a century.
Slaughter and Cook
Last month in Trump v. Slaughter, the Court heard a direct challenge to Humphrey’s Executor and the FTC’s “independence.”
The facts are clear: the President fired an FTC commissioner; lower courts ordered her reinstated; and the Supreme Court had to confront the logic of its own 1935 precedent.
During oral argument, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson gave away the game — not the legal argument, but the political theology of the Deep State.
She stated openly that an elected President must not be allowed to remove credentialed bureaucrats: economists, scientists, Ph.Ds, climate experts, doctors, and so forth.
Jackson argued — from the bench — that yes, experts should make all the big decisions because (she implied) elected officials and the voters are too stupid to be trusted and need supervision.
This is what Democrats mean by “Our Democracy.” It has nothing to do with democracy, much less the actual Constitution.
That fear — that demand — is the left’s immoral foundation: the people cannot be trusted with self-government.
They might elect the “wrong” President. The wrong President might fire (their) “experts.”
Those experts — their experts, not yours — are our betters, and must be obeyed.
Call it what you will: technocracy, communism, managerialism, fascism, or even monarchy or aristocracy. It’s all about an untouchable elite controlling you.
You know, for your own good.
In any case, from the left’s perspective, Donald Trump being able to fire an FTC commissioner is horrifying.
Trump being able to fire a Federal Reserve governor is the apocalypse.
Trump v. Cook is set for argument today in an emergency-docket posture (25A312).
The case turns on whether the President’s firing of Lisa Cook complied with the Federal Reserve Act’s “for cause” limitation and whether Cook received due process.
Whether her alleged mortgage fraud — which has not gone to trial — would constitute cause at your place of work is unquestionable. Whether it does at the Federal Reserve is a reasonable question.
But it’s not the important question.
That question assumes that Article 2, Section 1 can be legislatively restricted by a “for cause” limitation the Founders did not contemplate. It’s hard to see how that’s possible.
So the Court is now staring at the same question through two windows:
- Slaughter: Can Congress shield the commissioners of an “independent” agency from at-will removal under Humphrey’s Executor?
- Cook: Can Congress shield Fed governors from removal except “for cause,” and can courts block a President who says he has cause?
Different agencies. Same disease. And ultimately, the same question: can one branch gut the constitutional powers of another.
Cook’s defenders — like Slaughter’s — are leaning heavily on what I call constitutionality by longevity: We’ve been doing it this way for decades; the modern government is built on it; changing it now would destabilize things; therefore it must continue.
This, of course, was one of the key arguments against Brown v. Board of Education.
But the “Fed carveout” is also bunk.
The elites are virtually begging the Court to keep Humphrey’s intact for the Federal Reserve (or at least keep a special protection for “monetary policy”), even if they trim it elsewhere.
No.
Either we have a Constitution or we don’t.
The Constitution does not say: “The executive power shall be vested in a President — except for the economists.”
It does not say “except for the doctors.”
It does not say “except for Jerome Powell and Anthony Fauci.”
And it certainly doesn’t say: “except for monetary policy.”
Perhaps you think that a central bank whose leadership is answerable to the elected President is a bad idea.
There’s a solution to that: abolish the central bank, as the United States has done twice before.
Perhaps you think that’s a bad idea. No problem.
If America wants a fully independent central bank — with governmental powers but truly independent of the elected branches — then there is a simple, honest, constitutional method to achieve that: amend the Constitution.
Short of that, we live under the Constitution we have. And that Constitution vests all executive power in the President.
The Myth of Independence
But here is the deeper point: “independence” is a myth even on its own terms.
Independence is not a state of nature. It is a label we attach to human beings who, in reality, have ideologies, incentives, loyalties, class interests, career ambitions, and political motivations — whether they admit it or not.
The only question is not whether they are political: they are. The question is whether their politics are accountable to the voters.
The left’s whole pitch is “trust the experts.” But experts are not angels, and they’re not apolitical: in fact, the more expertise they have, the more doctrinaire their opinions usually become.
And the supposedly “independent” agencies they run aren’t “apolitical” either — they’re just insulated from the people whose lives they govern.
Like dukes or dictators.
Democracy is supposed to be messy. That is the price of liberty.
But here’s the practical reality. Under our Constitution, there are just 537 elected officials.
Presidents get to appoint around 5,000 subordinate officers: chiefs of staff, cabinet secretaries, and so forth.
Small numbers, right? They’re even smaller when you realize there are millions of federal employees, virtually all of whom wield some degree of real power.
Individually, they’re harder to fire than Lisa Cook claims she is. They’re hired by other bureaucrats, not the elected president.
And they’re virtually all Democrats, openly or otherwise.
Can 537 people — or even 5,537 people — with no power to hire or fire manage millions? Of course not.
And that’s the point: government by self-selecting left-wing “experts”, combined with the kabuki theater of elections to keep the public happy, or at least distracted.
FDR maintained the forms: he just completely remade the substance.
Let’s be blunt. The administrative state is and was intended to be a political machine.
It makes political decisions. It picks winners and losers. It reorganizes entire industries.
It coerces behavior. It punishes dissent. It regulates speech — directly or indirectly — through enforcement threats and compliance regimes.
And it does so while hiding behind the language of “expertise.”
That language is not just inaccurate: it is politically corrosive.
Because when the public sees the agencies as political — as they inevitably will — it no longer believes in neutral administration.
It believes (correctly) that it is being ruled by a class with its own interests and ideologies. That perception does not strengthen legitimacy. It destroys it.
So the choice is simple:
- Either the people, through elections, have ultimate control over the powers of government; or
- A permanent ruling class does.
There is no third option.
What Overturning Humphrey’s Executor Would — and Would Not — Do
Overruling Humphrey’s Executor does not abolish agencies.
It does not outlaw expertise.
It does not prevent Congress from creating commissions or boards.
It does not prevent courts from respecting agency expertise as persuasive.
It just restores accountability, and the system the Founders gave us.
The one we lived under quite successfully for the Republic’s first 150 years.
If an agency exercises executive power, the President must be able to control it.
That means he must be able to direct executive action, and remove those refuse to follow lawful orders, or who assert their “right” to “resist” the outcome of a lawful election.
If the public doesn’t like how the President uses that power, the public can remove him.
That’s what self-government means.
You know, actual “democracy,” not the “Our Democracy” tripe that actually excludes nearly everyone.
If you want to restore legitimacy, you restore accountability. The results will sometimes be messy. When they are, people will take elections more seriously, and active citizenship will be valued once again.
For ninety years, Humphrey’s Executor has been the linchpin of a soft coup d’état. In exile, Donald Trump came to grasp that reality, as he has so many others, and resolved to root it out. So far, his counterrevolution has been successful.
In all these 90 years, he is the first to even try. If he fails, he may be the last who’s even able.
If elections are to matter again — if voters are to govern again — the Supreme Court must finish what it started when it buried Chevron: it must confront and ultimately overturn the precedent that created the Deep State.
There is no fourth branch of government. It’s long past time the Court said so.
Rod D. Martin is a technology entrepreneur, futurist, hedge fund manager, and professor. Fox Business News calls him a “tech guru”, Britain’s Guardian labels him a “philosopher-capitalist”, and Gawker describes him as a “brilliant nonconformist.” He was a senior member of PayPal’s pre-IPO startup team and is a member of the Board of Governors of the Council for National Policy.
