It's not the President that would do the reversing. It's the Supreme Court that would be reversing a bad 1935 decision. Not Dred Scott (1857) bad, but maybe on par with "Corporate Personhood" (Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 1886) bad.
From Michael Every of Rabobank via ZeroHedge, December 9:
There are key central bank decisions this week, starting with the RBA today. However, the market has already priced in their expected outcomes. What it’s failing to price in, though it’s more important, is the stream of political and geopolitical developments in which it operates. Not Trump threatening Mexico with an extra 5% tariff over water; nor threats of tariffs on Indian rice and Canadian fertilizer; nor Trump about to unveil a $12bn farm aid package, tasking his top advisers with finding ways to lower soaring beef prices; nor Nigeria helping foil a coup in Benin, Thailand and Cambodia attacking each other, and Israel bombing Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Rather, the US Supreme Court appears ready to overturn decades of precedent to grant Trump the power to fire a swathe of government officials. Reversing ‘Humphrey’s Executor’ will allow him to overcome legal and bureaucratic resistance to the Gramscian changes he’s introducing to the political economy. That isn’t priced in. Indeed, despite Justice Kavanaugh’s opposition, it could put the Fed in the firing line too, with Governor Cook’s court case in January and a Fed Chair nominee, likely Hassett, promised within weeks. That isn’t priced in either....
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And from the Yale Journal on Regulation, Columbia Law School's Professor Philip Hamburger, November 18:
Removal: A Response to Professor Nelson, by Philip Hamburger
In an essay published earlier this fall, Professor Caleb Nelson argues that, as a matter of originalism, the President does not have a constitutional power to remove executive officers. Professor Nelson is a renowned scholar, whose arguments could well influence the Supreme Court in two upcoming removal cases: Trump v. Slaughter and Trump v. Cook. It’s therefore important to evaluate whether his historical claim about removal is correct.
The Breadth of Executive Power
Professor Nelson declares that, “[a]t its core, . . . executive power entails executing laws and judgments made by others, such as statutes enacted by Congress and judicial judgment rendered by courts.” From this remarkably narrow, law-executing definition of executive power, he concludes that executive power didn’t include any presidential authority to remove officers. Leave aside that his conclusion doesn’t follow from his premise. More fundamentally, he provides no evidence at all that the executive power was narrowly conceived in terms of the execution of the law. This cramped vision of the Constitution’s executive power is mistaken.
There is substantial evidence—some already published and more to come—that leading European theorists understood executive power to be a society’s strength or force, not only in law enforcement (primarily at home) but also in other national exertions (mostly abroad). Commentators as eminent as John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau, and as academic as Thomas Rutherforth, agreed that executive power was the “force” or “strength” of the society. Echoing this sort of vision, Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist that the Constitution divides the government’s powers into those of “Force,” “Will,” and “judgment.”
Of course, like all definitions of power, this vision of executive power in terms of the society’s force or strength could sometimes seem unclear. James Madison therefore, at least on occasion, characterized executive power as the government’s residual power—that is, its non-legislative and non-judicial action. Not so much a departure from the strength or force definition of executive power, this was a means of clarification.
None of this is to say that there was only one conception of executive power. The leading alternative to the vision of the society’s strength or force was a vision that focused on its domestic application—this being the view that executive power was a matter of law enforcement.
The division of eighteenth-century opinion between these two positions may seem an insuperable obstacle to understanding the Constitution. But drafters often adopted phrasing to resolve disagreements, and what needs to be understood is not the definition of executive power in general, but rather the Constitution’s executive power.
The Constitution’s very words confirm that its executive power was broader than mere law execution. Although Article II begins by granting the President “executive Power,” it later imposes his duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” It thereby distinguishes between the executive power, which is stated generically, and the related duty, which is confined to the execution of the laws. Being restricted to executing the laws, the duty shows that the more generically stated executive power meant something broader.
Executive power thus included law execution but was not limited to that. In this way, the Constitution itself recognizes that executive power goes beyond mere law execution. And the only widely held eighteenth-century conception of executive power that went beyond law-executing was, of course, the old vision of it as a society’s action, strength, or force.
Once one recognizes this definition of executive power, it is no surprise that James Madison, for example, thought that the executive power included both appointments and removal. Both, Madison explained, were part of the Constitution’s executive power, and the Constitution limited only appointments, not removal:
The constitution affirms, that the executive power shall be vested in the president: Are there exceptions to this proposition? Yes there are. The constitution says that, in appointing to office, the senate shall be associated with the president, unless in the case of inferior officers, when the law shall otherwise direct. Have we a right to extend this exception [to removals]? I believe not. If the constitution invested all executive power in the president, I venture to assert, that legislature has no right to diminish or modify his executive authority.
Madison added: “If any power whatsoever is in its nature executive it is the power of appointing, overseeing, and control[l]ing those who execute the laws,” and “the general rule established by the constitution,” subject to specified exceptions, was that “the executive power shall be vested in the president.”....
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The 1935 decision is going to be overturned, joining the list of Supreme Court Decisions Overruled by Subsequent Decisions.
