On Monday, December 8, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Trump v. Slaughter — which finds President Donald Trump and his administration arguing that he had a right to fire former Federal Trade Commission (FTC) commissioner Rebecca Slaughter and Slaughter countering that he had no business firing her from an independent agency established by Congress. At issue in the case is a far-right legal doctrine called the Unitary Executive Theory, which claims that U.S. presidents enjoy total control of the federal government’s executive branch.
Critics of the Unitary Executive Theory, including Slaughter, are arguing that the U.S. Constitution doesn’t give the executive branch nearly as much power as Trump claims that it does.
Veteran conservative columnist George Will examines the Unitary Executive Theory in his January 30 column for the Washington Post, stressing that the High Court has a golden opportunity to rein Trump in.
“As the Supreme Court prepares a landmark ruling about the scope of presidential power,” the 84-year-old Will explains, “the current president is acting more unleashed than any predecessor. He is demonstrating that a president not self-restrained by his or her constitutional conscience is almost unrestrainable. The court case concerns whether presidents have the power to remove, for any reason, all principal officers of executive agencies exercising significant executive power.”
The Never Trump conservative continues, “The ruling will emphatically bolster or substantially quarantine the ‘Unitary Executive Theory.’ It holds that all executive power is vested in the president, who exercises sole authority over executive branch activities. The theory says Congress has no authority to limit the president from exercising command over administrative policymaking by denying the president’s power to remove agencies’ principal officers.”
Will notes that the Framers of the U.S. Constitution “could have, but did not, limit the president’s removal power,” but he goes on to say that “the argument against an unlimitable removal power is stronger.”
“If the Court gives its imprimatur to a strong version of the Unitary Executive Theory,” the conservative columnist argues, “presidential power will become even more formidable and less circumscribable than current events reveal it to be. This is a recipe for enhanced presidentialism — more government by executive fiats, more president-centric politics, more congressional anemia…. When considering the logic of our constitutional structure, the justices should not disregard their conclusions’ likely consequences for the nation’s political practices and civic culture.”
George Will’s full Washington Post column is available at this link (subscription required).