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Professor Nelson, who teaches at the University of Virginia and served as a law clerk to Justice #ClarenceThomas, has been exceptionally influential. His scholarship has been cited in more than a dozen #SCOTUS opinions & by every member of the 6-justice conservative majority.
#law #HumphreysExecutor #ActivistCourt #Trump #Autocracy #power #ExecutiveBranch #SeparationOfPowers #Congress 🧵
Nelson’s September article was repeatedly cited by lawyers for Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, the member of the #FTC whose firing is at issue in Monday’s case, in her main #SCOTUS brief. In reply, lawyers for #Trump wrote that Ms. Slaughter’s brief “rehashes objections to the removal power” from a “recent essay by Professor Caleb Nelson.”
#law #HumphreysExecutor #ActivistCourt #Autocracy #power #ExecutiveBranch #SeparationOfPowers #Congress 🧵
Professor Nelson’s article acknowledged that #SCOTUS “appears to be moving toward a sweepingly pro-president position.”
Letting the president fire ofcls “for reasons good or bad,” Nelson wrote, would grant him “an enormous amount of #power —more power, I think, than any sensible person should want anyone to have, & more power than any member of the founding generation could have anticipated.”
#law #HumphreysExecutor #SCOTUS #ActivistCourt #Trump #ExecutiveBranch #SeparationOfPowers #Congress 🧵
But the question is not whether allowing limits on the president’s power to fire officials is sensible, Professor Nelson wrote.
“I am an originalist, & if the original meaning of the #Constitution compelled this outcome, I would be inclined to agree that the Supreme Court should respect it until the Constitution is amended through the proper processes,” he wrote.
But the textual & historical evidence is “far more equivocal than the current court has been suggesting,” he wrote.
Back to the courtroom [done w/discussion of Nelson’s article]
Justice Elena Kagan says independent agencies do a lot of legislating & a lot of judging [I would say regulating, not “legislating & judging, but that’s me]. Giving the president unfettered authority over them, she says, would concentrate “massive unchecked power” in the #ExecutiveBranch, at odds with the #SeparationOfPowers.
#law #HumphreysExecutor #SCOTUS #ActivistCourt #Trump #Autocracy #power #Congress 🧵
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