![]() ![]() They argued that literally every action taken by the FHFA since its creation 13 years ago must be declared invalid. The Court’s previous decisions, however, have some language suggesting that any action taken by an agency led by a director who is unconstitutionally shielded from presidential accountability is void - and that’s certainly how the plaintiffs in Collins read those decisions. Then it oversaw hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of transactions with the Treasury Department to keep these two companies afloat. In carrying out this mission, the agency effectively took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two semi-public companies that play an important role in stabilizing the mortgage industry. The FHFA was created to repair the housing market turmoil that sparked the 2008 recession, and to prevent similar crises from occurring again. And the plaintiffs in this case claimed that some truly outlandish consequences follow. The real question in Collins is what consequences flow from the fact that, from 2008, when the FHFA was created, until the Court’s decision in Collins, the president did not have the power to fire the head of that agency. A federal law provides that the head of the FHFA may only be fired “for cause.” The Court’s decision in Collins applies the Court’s holding in Seila Law, and holds that the president must have the power to fire the FHFA director at will.īut that’s only one part of the Collins decision. ![]() After Seila Law, President Joe Biden or whoever else occupies the White House can fire the head of the CFPB whenever they want.Ĭollins involves a different agency, known as the Federal Housing Finance Agency, but it involves the exact same issue as Seila Law. That means that the president typically must be able to fire agency leaders and other top government officials at will - a view that the Supreme Court upheld in 2020. The premise of the unitary executive doctrine is that all officials who execute federal law must be accountable to the president. Under that law, the CFPB director served a five-year term and could only be fired for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” In that case, the Supreme Court struck down a federal law that gave the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau a degree of independence from the president. The unitary executive had a previous test in front of the Supreme Court in Seila Law v. The Collins plaintiffs made an entirely plausible argument under those decisions that could have had devastating real-world consequences - in this case, an earthquake for the housing sector - but the Court chose to avoid that path. ![]() Sign up to receive our newsletter each Friday.Īlito’s decision does not abandon the unitary executive, but it steps back from some of the more alarming aspects of the Court’s previous decisions applying this and similar doctrines. Vox’s German Lopez is here to guide you through the Biden administration’s burst of policymaking. The vote in Collins was a bit messy, with different justices joining different parts of Alito’s opinion, but every member of the Court except for Justice Neil Gorsuch agreed that the plaintiffs in Collins asked for far too much. Although Justice Samuel Alito enthusiastically supported the unitary executive doctrine in the past, he wrote a majority opinion in Collins that walks back some of that doctrine’s most frightful implications. Yellen, that threatened to throw the entire US housing market into turmoil, unless a majority of the Court was willing to take a couple steps back away from its almost religious devotion to the unitary executive doctrine. This obsession birthed a $124 billion Supreme Court case, Collins v. One of the conservative legal movement’s oddest obsessions involves something known as the “ unitary executive,” the idea that all federal officers who execute federal law must be accountable to the president of the United States, which includes the president’s right to fire many senior government officials at will. ![]()
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