Sarah Isgur hosts a podcast for The Dispatch, a conservative media outlet. She is also the author of Last Branch Standing: A Potentially Surprising, Occasionally Witty Journey Inside Today’s Supreme Court. Last month, Isgur authored a Guest Essay that appeared in the December 8, 2025, edition of The New York Times. The title of her Guest Essay, online, was as follows: "Actually, The Supreme Court Has A Plan." This "Plan," one gathers from Isgur's essay, is intended "to rebalance the separation of powers in the federal government," a topic directly touched upon in my blog posting yesterday.
Isgur's online essay speaks to the likelihood that the Supreme Court is about to overturn a long-term precedent, established by the case of Humphrey's Executor. The Court's decision in that case, decided in 1935, held that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had no right to "fire" a Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, when the law setting up that Commission made clear that the Commission was to be "independent."
Isgur worries about any such claim of "independence." "In a self-governing republic," Isgur says, "voters have to be able to hold someone accountable," and Isgur therefore thinks that any effort by Congress to limit the president's power to fire specified officers, in agencies created by the Congress, is simply, absolutely, dead-on wrong. Here is how she puts it:
“At its most basic, the idea [is] that when the Constitution says, 'The executive power shall be vested in a president,' it means only the president. All members of the executive branch derive their authority from the president, and Congress can’t put limitations on the president’s power to remove executive branch officials. In a self-governing republic, voters have to be able to hold someone accountable (emphasis added)."
According to Isgur, the problem today is that the federal bureaucracy, or the "Deep State," or the "Administrative State," as some call it, is not really accountable to anyone. Congress has made many important federal agencies "independent," so Congressional legislation, she thinks, doesn't really hold the agencies accountable, and under the precedent of Humphrey's Executor, the president can't effectively tell the heads of those agencies what to do, either.
It is unclear to me, having read what Isgur has to say, what "Plan" she thinks the Court actually has in mind to deal with the situation just described, but her statement, as highlighted above, is clearly wrong. Members of the executive branch don't "derive their authority from the president." They derive their authority from the laws enacted by Congress. In our system (as it's supposed to work, anyway), Congress "legislates," and the president "executes," but the President is only empowered to "execute" according to the laws enacted by Congress. The president, under our Constitution, has no independent authority that allows him to establish and implement his own personal public policy, based on what the president thinks that public policy should be.
As our news media make clear every day, however, our current president doesn't agree with this system. He thinks that since he was elected "President" he has a completely independent authority to make deals with foreign nations, to use the nation's military forces to kill those in foreign waters he decides should be killed, to topple governments, and to set up tariffs not authorized by Congress but which tariffs he, as president, can change at any moment, on his whim, to establish what he, the president, thinks would be a good result. This is just a "partial list," of course, of what our current president believes he is somehow entitled to do, as the nation's Chief Executive.
There may well be some problems with federal agencies becoming so independent that they, and they alone, decide that our national policies should be, instead of simply implementing the policy directives enacted by the Congress. Let's agree that this is both a potential and a real problem. That's the issue that has led to claims that there is a "Deep State," or an "Administrative State," independent of the people, independent of Congress, and independent of the president that is operating solely on its own ideas of what is right.
If there is a problem there - and I'm willing to say there may well be - how do we deal with it? Where is this "Plan" that the Supreme Court supposedly has?
Well, Isgur's essay makes plain that the Supreme Court's "Plan," if the Court does, as now predicted, remove the "independence" of federal agencies, is to let the president decide, unilaterally, what every federal agency should do. Adam Liptak's story in the December 9, 2025, edition of The Times quotes a prominent "originalist" legal scholar, Caleb Nelson, as coming out against this idea that the so-called "unitary executive" understanding of the Constitution is correct. "Letting the president fire officials 'for reasons good or bad,'" Nelson says, "would grant him 'an enormous amount of power - more power, I think, than any sensible person should want any person to have.'"
In other words, according to a prominent, respected, "originalist" scholar (meaning a "conservative" legal scholar), what Isgur is advocating is not a "plan" to restore democratic control over our federal agencies and to hold them accountable to the people. It's a "plan" to make the president the only person in our government who has the ability to tell federal agencies what to do, and if that is how the government works, who cares about Congress, anyway?
Well, here is who should care: "WE, the people." WE should care, because those Members of Congress are supposed to be working for us! They are our "representatives."
If you'd care to read what a "liberal" commentator has to say about this topic, I strongly endorse this excellent discussion by former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance.
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