Justice Barrett, Trump v. Slaughter, and Presidential Removal Power from 1881 to 1901: Every president from 1881 to 1901 successfully defended presidential at-will removal power. (Steven Calabresi, 1.6.2026, Volokh Conspiracy)
During the oral argument in Trump v. Slaughter, Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked counsel for respondent Slaughter how long independent agencies had existed for and counsel suggested to her, incorrectly, that they dated back to the last twenty years of the 19th Century. In fact, as I will show in a series of posts on this blog, no truly independent agency ever existed prior to the decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States in 1935. My full account of the history of presidential resistance to the creation of independent agencies during this period appears in: Steven G. Calabresi & Christopher S. Yoo, The Unitary Executive: Presidential Power from Washington to Bush (Yale University Press 2008). This blog post will discuss presidential removal power from 1881 to 1901. Subsequent posts will examine presidential removal power from 1901 to 2009. None of these posts could have been written by me without consulting and quoting from the excellent work done by my book co-author, Professor Christopher S. Yoo. He gets all the credit, and I take all the blame for whatever is said below.
In recounting our actual practice from 1881 to 1999, I do not mean to endorse the view that this practice is constitutionally relevant to deciding Trump v. Slaughter. I believe that President Trump should win this case because of the original public meaning of the text of the Constitution. I recognize, however, that only two of the nine justices on the current Supreme Court follow exclusively the original public meaning of the Constitution’s text. All the other seven justices on today’s Supreme Court think, to various degrees, that arguments from practice are sometimes relevant to the question of whether Humphrey’s Executor (1935) should be overruled. Since I have co-published the book with Christopher Yoo cited above on our actual practice, and since the issue is now pending before the Supreme Court, I want to explain why the arguments from presidential practice that Christopher Yoo helped me to write about 18 years ago support overruling Humphrey’s Executor (1935).