The Supreme Court Monday upheld President Donald Trump’s dismissal without cause of the last Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) despite nearly a century of court precedent protecting the official.

The court’s 6-3 decision is the court’s strongest signal yet that it may overturn Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S., a 90-year-old ruling that until recently largely protected independent agencies from undue political interference stemming from the White House.

In addition to granting Trump’s request to a stay lower court ruling reinstating FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, the court also said it will hear oral arguments in December on officially overturning Humphrey’s.

The ruling — while provisional — is significant because the high court also said it will hear arguments in December on overturning a 90-year-old precedent that allowed Congress to set up independent, nonpartisan agencies insulated from political interference by the president if they do not wield executive power...

“The majority, stay order by stay order, has handed full control of all those agencies to the President,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent. “He may now remove — so says the majority, though Congress said differently — any member he wishes, for any reason or no reason at all. And he may thereby extinguish the agencies’ bipartisanship and independence.”

In 1935, the justices ruled that President Franklin D. Roosevelt could not fire a board member of the FTC, William Humphrey, simply because he opposed the president’s New Deal policies. Congress had stipulated that members could only be fired for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance.” The case is known as Humphrey’s Executor v. United States.

The current Supreme Court has all but overturned that precedent in recent rulings. The justices allowed Trump to fire Democratic members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission in July and members of the National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board in May. Trump gave no reasons for the officials’ dismissals, despite statutes saying they could only be removed for cause.

Independent agencies in the executive branch have regulatory or rule making authority and are insulated from presidential control, usually because the president's power to dismiss the agency head or a member is limited...

... The degree to which the president has the power to use executive orders to set policy for independent executive agencies is disputed.[4] Many orders specifically exempt independent agencies, but some do not...

In 1935, the Supreme Court in the case of Humphrey's Executor v. United States decided that although the president had the power to remove officials from agencies that were "an arm or an eye of the executive", it upheld statutory limitations on the president's power to remove officers of administrative bodies that performed quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial functions, such as the Federal Trade Commission.[1]...