The Ultimate Legal Fight Over Who Decides the Rules in America

In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt fired a member of the Federal Trade Commission, fearing he’d block corporate reforms his administration had designed to help end the Great Depression. The conservative-leaning Supreme Court of the time ruled that the move was an overreach of presidential power. In a unanimous opinion, the justices wrote that Congress intended for the FTC, like other regulatory agencies it had created, to be a nonpartisan body of expert decision-makers, not one the White House controlled.

Emboldened by that ruling, lawmakers went on to create dozens of independent agencies in the intervening years, with the idea that ...