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While Donald Trump publicly asserts absolute authority to impose, reverse, and reimpose ruinous tariffs on the nation’s trading partners, his administration has quietly been claiming another radical power: the absolute freedom to fire members of the executive branch who, in the president’s view, stand in the way of his agenda. Since returning to office, Trump has illegally removed several agency heads, including Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board and Cathy Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board. These firings have ping-ponged around the lower courts, and the Justice Department is now asking the Supreme Court to greenlight them. Doing so would overturn nearly a century of precedent and further consolidate Trump’s grasp around the federal government.

In a Slate Plus bonus episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed the connection between Trump’s chaotic tariffs and unlawful firings—and how the two issues could fuse to work against him at the Supreme Court. A preview of their conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: These two human beings have been fired and unfired and refired and re-unfired too many times to count. What is their status right now?

Mark Joseph Stern: They are currently fired! Here’s the rundown: Donald Trump fired them even though Congress specifically said they could not be fired. The district courts reinstated them, citing their statutory protections against removal. A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit then refired them. Then the full D.C. Circuit, sitting en banc, reinstated them. But on Wednesday, Chief Justice John Roberts refired them through an administrative stay that he handed down while the full court mulls the issue. Gwynne Wilcox was just finishing a “welcome back” party at the NLRB when his order came down. So she went from “welcome back” to being welcomed back out the door.

With Wilcox and Harris refired, these agencies—which are key to protecting organized labor and civil servants—are paralyzed and unable to do much of their critical work. The full Supreme Court is now deciding what to do about this case and will probably give us an answer next week. The Trump administration has asked the court to simply take up the case on the merits, moving it from the shadow docket to the rocket docket, with a decision likely due in June. If it agrees, that will make an already chaotic term something closer to insanity.

The big question here is whether the Supreme Court is finally ready to overturn this 1935 precedent called Humphrey’s Executor. This was the case that limited the president’s power to fire the heads of multimember agencies exactly like these. It has been under fire from SCOTUS’s conservative majority for a long time. Some lower court judges have said they just want to call it dead without waiting for SCOTUS to get there.

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I do wonder, though, if this past week’s total tariff mayhem gives us reason to believe that maybe the Supreme Court won’t be completely ready to pull the trigger and kill Humphrey’s Executor. Because it would be very bad for other reasons that are becoming clearer each day.

This is the one thing that’s giving me hope. And maybe it’s slightly delusional. But the reality is that it would be nearly impossible to overturn Humphrey’s Executor without abolishing the independence of the Federal Reserve, allowing the president to fire its members and essentially seize control of monetary policy. At which point he could irresponsibly slash rates, trigger a recession, or do even worse. This is a fear that some conservatives have acknowledged; even Justice Brett Kavanaugh, before he joined the Supreme Court, more or less said that the best argument for Humphrey’s Executor is that it protects the independence of the Fed. There is so much data showing that an independent central bank is much better for the economy than a bank subject to partisan pressure and interference. This is something the Chamber of Commerce understands. It’s something Chamber-aligned justices like Roberts and Kavanaugh surely grasp.

So I do think some of the conservative justices will cringe to see Trump imposing these massive, crushing tariffs based on an arbitrary formula possibly cooked up by ChatGPT, then pulling back after the market crashes, but keeping some in place and triggering these wild swings. It might make them question whether they really want to be the ones who let the president seize control of the Fed, tank monetary policy, and thrust us into a recession. The lines of accountability would be pretty clear: They would go straight to the Supreme Court. Because Congress said it wanted an independent Fed, and created one by protecting its members against removal, and the independent Fed has served us very well as a nation.

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At the same time, I think the conservative justices probably do want to let Trump fire Gwynne Wilcox and Cathy Harris. I’m sure they hate the fact that agencies like the NLRB have a measure of independence against Republican presidents. And they’re all inclined to deploy the unitary executive theory, with its thought-terminating clichés about “political accountability,” to crush the independence of these less-liked agencies. But in the back of their minds, they must know that doing so would create an existential crisis for the Fed. Because, as a matter of law and logic, if the removal protections for the NLRB and the MSPB are unconstitutional, then so are the removal protections for the Fed.

I suppose the Supreme Court could write an opinion that arbitrarily exempts the Fed and declare that Humphrey’s Executor still exists for one agency only. But that would be so brazenly and obviously political that frankly I think there’s a real chance Trump would just ignore it and try to fire members of the Fed anyway. That includes Chairman Jay Powell, who is currently preventing Trump from imposing irresponsible cuts to the interest rates. This is all speculation, of course. But if anything were going to give the conservative justices pause before overturning Humphrey’s Executor, it would be a mad-king president wielding the power of tariffs so crazily that any rational observer could see he’d thrust us into a generational recession if he got his hands on the Federal Reserve.

It sounds like the place where we wind up may be: You can dismantle the federal government, that’s fine, but keep your mad-king hands off my fishing trip in Alaska. That’s where the rubber hits the road.

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