President Trump’s attempts to purge and downsize the federal workforce across myriad agencies and departments have been met with swift legal challenges. An array of judges have already issued preliminary injunctions, restraining orders and others rulings against the administration’s actions. Much of that pushback comes from the fact that the laws governing these agencies have specific legal guardrails meant to protect them from partisan politicization by shielding senior officials and employees.

Several judges have ruled that the Trump administration is violating those laws in what observers warn is an effort to replace civil and military service professionals with partisan loyalists.

President Trump’s allies, however, are advancing a legal theory of total executive-branch control wherein those guardrails themselves might be deemed unconstitutional, and some are hoping to test that theory in the Supreme Court. To do so, Trump’s allies will need to convince the Supreme Court to overturn 90 years of legal precedent, revisiting the 1935 decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. That decision underpins all of the professional, non-partisan federal bureaucracies of the modern nation, including agencies like the FAA, FDA, SEC and FTC.

Watch the above video as Straight Arrow News contributor Ben Weingarten reviews Humphrey’s Executor and explains why he says the 1935 decision should be revisited under the second Trump administration.

The following is an excerpt from the above video:

Some history is in order here. In a 1926 case, Myers v. U.S., the Supreme Court held that the power to remove appointed officers is vested in the president and the president alone. Absent that power, he could not discharge his constitutional duty of seeing that the laws be faithfully executed. Chief Justice Taft wrote for the majority.

But a decade later, as the administrative state rapidly expanded and independent regulatory agencies emerged in the throes of the New Deal, the Supreme Court hemmed in the president’s removal power by upholding congressional restrictions on it.

Tenure protections in FTC legislation permitted the president to remove commissioners only for inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office, not at will. In that case, known as Humphrey’s Executor, the court distinguished between the president’s illimitable power to remove purely executive officers and the limited power to remove those officers serving in independent agencies exercising purportedly quasi-legislative and/or quasi-judicial powers.

In recent years, the Supreme Court has hacked away at administrative state power and refused to extend independent agency protections for officers from removal beyond the 1935 precedent.