A joke started to circulate among law professors within hours after the Supreme Court announced two decisions on executive power last month, on the next-to-last day of the court’s term.

One decision, Trump v. Slaughter, gave the president the power to fire the leaders of independent agencies for any reason. The other, Trump v. Cook, carved out an exception for the Federal Reserve.

The joke, as recalled by Beau Baumann, a law professor at the University of Utah: “I hope the guy who wrote Slaughter doesn’t run into the guy who wrote Cook. That would be a really rough conversation.”

Both majority opinions were written by Chief Justice John Roberts, hence the joke. The two opinions “read like they had been written by two different people,” Lev Menand, a law professor at Columbia University, wrote on Just Security.

‘A Radical Remaking of American Government’

Slaughter was by far the more legally significant of the two decisions. In letting the president remove the leaders of government agencies for no reason and in the face of statutes that required him to have a good one, the court’s six Republican appointees embraced a turbocharged vision of the presidency, one with vast powers and few checks.

It was an echo of the 2024 majority opinion in Trump v. United States, which granted President Trump, then running for a second term, substantial immunity from prosecution. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion in that case, too, and he was again joined by all of the Republican appointees and none of the Democratic ones.

As in the Slaughter decision, the chief justice called for a vigorous and energetic president whose core responsibilities cannot be constrained by Congress or the courts. “Unlike anyone else,” he wrote, “the president is a branch of government, and the Constitution vests in him sweeping powers and duties.”

Both decisions were grounded in the unitary executive theory, which says the president should have complete control of the executive branch. It follows, proponents of the theory say, that Congress is powerless to shield the leaders of independent agencies from being removed by the president.

But the idea has broader implications for the separation of powers. The ability to fire high-level officials was “always just the appetizer,” Professor Baumann said. “We’re basically at Day 1 in a radical remaking of American government.”

Indeed, Professor Menand wrote, the Slaughter decision “held unconstitutional the structure of much of the federal government.”

Trump Wastes No Time

Trump certainly welcomed the ruling, saying in a social media post that it was “the Greatest Increase in Presidential Power in the last 100 years.”

The majority let the president fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission and indicated that he was free to remove the leaders of lots of agencies, presumably including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission.

Relying on the decision, he forced out the three remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission, an independent, bipartisan body meant to support states in administering their elections.

Jane Manners, a law professor at Fordham, said that it was self-evident that such a commission should be protected from partisan influence. “The fact that this was Trump’s first action in the wake of Slaughter seems like a weighty example” of the impact of the decision, she said.

Line Drawing and the Fed

Against this backdrop, the special treatment of the Fed can seem puzzling. After calling for a muscular presidency in almost every other realm, Chief Justice Roberts said that setting monetary policy was not the exercise of executive power.

Professor Menand wondered whether the chief justice had drawn a principled line. “Why should monetary policy be any different from competition policy, capital markets policy or telecommunications policy?” he asked.

Chief Justice Roberts did suggest that some officials and entities could be exempt from total presidential control, listing congressionally chartered groups like the Boy Scouts of America, the Society of American Florists and Ornamental Horticulturalists, and Georgetown University. He said similar things about courts created by Congress, like the Tax Court and the Court of Federal Claims.

He did not address the constitutionality of civil service protections Congress had adopted for ordinary government workers, as opposed to agency leaders. And the day after it issued the Slaughter decision, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked Trump from firing the Library of Congress official in charge of copyrights, suggesting another entity the court may view as distinct from those covered by Slaughter.

But the bottom line, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent in the case, was that “dozens of independent commissions are now likely to become purely executive agencies, shifting tremendous power over broad swaths of American life into the president’s hands.”

She could not help but express a kind of grudging admiration for Chief Justice Roberts’ work.

“With remarkable steadfastness,” Justice Sotomayor wrote, “the majority simply refuses to explain where its theory leads or where it ends.”

Other Legal News

• Alaska seized a bush pilot’s $95,000 plane over a six-pack of beer. On Monday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear his challenge to the forfeiture, and will most likely set the case for argument in the fall. I talked to the pilot, Ken Jouppi, last year when I wrote about his case.

• The Trump administration has lost or abandoned hundreds of criminal cases against protesters and others caught up in its immigration dragnet, a Times investigation found. Of the more than 400 resolved so far, nearly half have unraveled, an abysmal showing by the standards of ordinary federal prosecutions.

• Roger Rogoff, who was fired by the Trump administration last week less than an hour after a panel of district court judges unanimously appointed him to lead the United States Attorney’s Office in Seattle, filed a lawsuit on Tuesday contesting his termination.

Mailbag

A Justice on Trial

Can Supreme Court justices be impeached? — Penelope Z. Strauss

Yes. The justices, like other federal officials, are subject to impeachment for, as the Constitution puts it, “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Only one member of the court, Justice Samuel Chase, has ever been impeached. In 1804, in eight articles of impeachment, the House accused him of intemperate and partisan behavior.

But Justice Chase prevailed after his trial in the Senate, where none of the articles garnered the votes of two-thirds of the senators required for conviction and removal from office.

The lesson of the Chase impeachment, Chief Justice Roberts wrote in his year-end report on the federal judiciary last December, was that “disapproval of a judge’s decisions provided an invalid basis for removal from office.”

He said much the same thing in a statement issued in March 2025 after Trump called for the impeachment of a judge who had sought to block the removal of more than 200 migrants to El Salvador. “For more than two centuries,” the chief justice said, “it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”

Conventional misconduct can, of course, be the basis for impeachment. Eight federal judges have been impeached, convicted and removed over the years, most for egregious criminal and personal behavior.

And one member of the Supreme Court, Justice Abe Fortas, resigned in 1969 in an ethics scandal, and might have faced impeachment had he tried to hang on.

I’d love to hear your questions on the law, the courts or whatever is on your mind. Send them my way at the-docket@nytimes.com.

Closing Argument

A Whiskey Rebellion

It is hard to persuade the Supreme Court to hear a case, but one thing really helps. If you can demonstrate that federal appeals courts have issued conflicting decisions, the chances that justices will grant review shoot up. It doesn’t hurt if the dispute is colorful or involves an interesting constitutional question.

A petition seeking review filed on Monday seems to check all those boxes. It asks whether a law enacted in 1868 that makes it a crime to distill hard liquor at home is constitutional.

On April 10, the Fifth Circuit said no. Eleven days later, the Sixth Circuit said yes.

Lawyers for John Ream, a home-brewing enthusiast in Ohio who wants to try his hand at distilling bourbon and rye, told the justices that the conflict “is as square as they come.”

“Federal criminal law on distilling,” they wrote, “now means one thing in Texas and the opposite in Ohio.”

The Justice Department has already come close to conceding that at least one of the dueling cases warranted the Supreme Court’s attention.

The Fifth Circuit’s decision, the government’s lawyers wrote in unsuccessfully urging the full appeals court to reconsider, “invalidates a longstanding act of Congress and directly conflicts with the Sixth Circuit’s decision in Ream.”

The Supreme Court is likely to consider whether to hear Ream’s appeal early this fall. If at least four justices vote to review the case, the court would probably hear arguments early next year.

It would not be the first time the court considered what the law has to say about alcohol. In a Second Amendment decision in June, Justice Neil Gorsuch spent more than two pages surveying the impressive intake of the founding generation, concluding that there was a “culture of copious drinking” in early America.

Please send me your comments on executive power, impeaching justices, home distilling or anything else at the-docket@nytimes.com. See you next week. — Adam