Supreme Court Rulings on Executive Branch Powers in Line with Declaration’s View of Presidency

Critics of Trump v. Slaughter, which recognizes President Donald Trump’s power to fire federal officers, will cloak themselves in the authority of the Declaration of Independence. They will claim that this week’s great expansion of executive power — the broadest in a century — contradicts our founding document’s assault on monarchical power. Critics of the Supreme Court majority could not read the Founding more wrong, especially as we celebrate its 250th anniversary this weekend.

The Declaration of Independence’s attack on King George III did not amount to a wholesale rejection of executive power. Denying the sovereignty of the King-in-Parliament, the Revolution instead founded the new nation on natural rights and government by consent. The Founders may have launched a series of experiments to integrate the executive into a republican form of government, but they did not fundamentally reject the power itself. Slaughter’s reading of the Constitution to grant presidents the unlimited power to fire subordinate officers rests within this original understanding.

About the Author

John Yoo

John Yoo is the Thomas W. Smith Senior Fellow at the Civitas Institute, University of Texas at Austin; Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley; and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is a co-author of the just-released two-volume American Constitutional Law (Routledge, 2026).

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Declaration of Independence

Critics of Trump v. Slaughter, which recognizes President Donald Trump’s power to fire federal officers, will cloak themselves in the authority of the Declaration of Independence. They will claim that this week’s great expansion of executive power — the broadest in a century — contradicts our founding document’s assault on monarchical power. Critics of the Supreme Court majority could not read the Founding more wrong, especially as we celebrate its 250th anniversary this weekend.

The Declaration of Independence’s attack on King George III did not amount to a wholesale rejection of executive power. Denying the sovereignty of the King-in-Parliament, the Revolution instead founded the new nation on natural rights and government by consent. The Founders may have launched a series of experiments to integrate the executive into a republican form of government, but they did not fundamentally reject the power itself. Slaughter’s reading of the Constitution to grant presidents the unlimited power to fire subordinate officers rests within this original understanding.

About the Author

John Yoo

John Yoo is the Thomas W. Smith Senior Fellow at the Civitas Institute, University of Texas at Austin; Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley; and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is a co-author of the just-released two-volume American Constitutional Law (Routledge, 2026).