When Your Vote Stops Protecting You

Slaughter Ruling Opens Door Even Wider to Corruption

By Phil Huber

ADVANCE COLUMNIST

Mick Haupt/Unsplash

A few miles from where I live, men once fought and died over the shape of this republic. This is also George Washington’s hometown—the place where a young man was taught that no leader stands above the law. On June 29, the Supreme Court forgot that lesson, and reshaped the republic again, this time with the stroke of a pen.

In a 6–3 decision, Trump v. Slaughter, the Court ruled that the president can fire the leaders of independent agencies—like the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the National Labor Relations Board—for any reason at all, or no reason. To do it, the Court threw out a rule it had followed since 1935.

Here’s what that means in plain terms. You can still vote for your members of Congress. They can still pass laws that create agencies to keep your food safe, your job fair, and your savings honest. But they can no longer protect those agencies from a president who decides they should work for him instead of for you. Congress builds the fence. The Court just gave the president the key to take it down.

Look at the one agency the Court chose to protect. On the same day, it ruled that the president cannot fire members of the Federal Reserve, the agency that watches over banks and the stock market. So the agency that guards Wall Street and your retirement account stays independent. The agencies that guard you—your products, your paycheck, your air and water—do not. That tells you something about whose interests came first.

The damage won’t stop at one agency. Think about government contracts. For a long time, fair contracting has depended on watchdogs who can’t be pushed around—inspectors general, auditors, people who protect whistleblowers. Take away their protection, and you open the door to the oldest trick in government: contracts and favors go not to the best bid or the honest worker, but to the most loyal. That’s the “spoils system” reformers worked to end more than a century ago. And it would land hardest on the small businesses that power our local economy. A big contractor can hire lobbyists, lawyers, and the right political connections to survive in a system that runs on loyalty. A small firm—the kind that employs your neighbors here in the Fredericksburg region—cannot. When the rules turn on who you know instead of how good your work is, the little guy is the first one pushed out. The thing that held that back was independence—and independence is exactly what this ruling takes away.

From there, the risk spreads. Corruption rarely shows up all at once. It creeps in wherever no one is watching. When the people whose job is to catch fraud and abuse can be fired the moment they get in the way, the warning light goes dark. I’m not predicting one big scandal. I’m warning about a change in the air—where the people paid to say “no” know their jobs depend on saying “yes.”

I want to be careful about one worry in particular, because it’s close to me. As a former Army officer, I don’t believe this ruling forces anyone to join a political party to serve. Military service stands on its own legal ground, and our troops still swear their oath to the Constitution, not to any one person. But the tradition of a military that stays out of politics doesn’t protect itself. It holds up because the civilian leaders above the troops answer to the law, not to one man’s loyalty. As those leaders all become people the president can fire at will—and who feel they must prove their loyalty—the pressure to drag the ranks into politics grows. The danger isn’t a party card at the recruiting office. It’s the slow wearing-down of a rule that has kept American soldiers servants of the whole country, not tools of one side.

Now the hardest part. Congress can start to rebuild some of what the Court tore down. But the full repair needs more than new laws. It needs a president who refuses to use this power as a weapon, and over time a Supreme Court brought back to a fairer reading of the Constitution—through honest means, like elections and reasonable reforms such as term limits and real ethics rules. None of that happens fast. And that’s the part that should worry us most: this kind of damage is done in a single season but takes generations to undo. Trust, once broken, comes back slowly, if it comes back at all.

So time is not on our side—and we’re not the only ones in the race. While we turn our own government into a loyalty test, China keeps growing stronger every year, happy to watch the world’s oldest democracy weaken itself from the inside. The contest of this century won’t be settled by armies alone. It will be settled by which country can govern itself honestly and keep the trust of its own people. Right now, we are giving that edge away. No enemy abroad could have done this to us. We are doing it to ourselves.

The answer is not to give up, and it is certainly not to quit on elections. It’s the opposite: pay closer attention, and act while there’s still time. Ask your representatives how they plan to rebuild the protections the Court just stripped. Vote as if the shape of your government depends on it—because now it plainly does. Independence was never a gift from the courts. It was a choice your representatives made for you. They will have to make it again, and we must insist that they do.

***

Phil Huber is a retired Army Reserve colonel, a federal civil servant, and a retired consultant who writes on civic education. He lives in Fredericksburg.