The Supreme Court Just Made Rank Corruption Great Again

The six unscrupulous Republicans on the Supreme Court—over the loud objections of the three true constitutionalists on the court—are aggressively dragging America back not just to the 1950s but, as of Monday, to the 1830s.

Arguably the most depraved president in American history, Andrew Jackson (aka “The Indian Killer” a title he gave himself), President Donald Trump’s favorite, whose picture he hung in the Oval Office, invented what came to be called the “Spoils System.”

If you wanted a job in the federal government, or a favorable ruling from one of the then-few federal agencies, all you had to do was give a big enough gift to President Jackson, or pledge your loyalty to him instead of the Constitution and the people, and your wish would be granted.

Prior presidents, particularly among the Founding generation, were generally strongly opposed to such a corrupt system.

On Monday those six Republican lickspittles on the Supreme Court universalized the new, Trump-era Spoils System by ruling that Trump can replace the heads of any federal regulatory agency (with one exception) with his own toadies.

Weeks after Thomas Jefferson was sworn in as president in 1801, the merchants of New Haven, Connecticut wrote a letter to the new president worrying out loud that he’d install loyalists rather than capable administrators who may have some oversight of issues like duties and tariffs that would impact them. Jefferson replied:

The remonstrance [your concerned letter] laments "that a change in the administration must produce a change in the subordinate officers;" in other words, that it should be deemed necessary for all officers to think with their principal [the president].

Jefferson then implicitly referenced the integrity of President George Washington, whose closest advisor, speechwriter, and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton wrote of Washington’s hiring process:

He will... investigate with care the qualities requisite to the stations to be filled, and to prefer with impartiality the persons who may have the fairest pretensions to them.

And Jefferson pointed to the occasional corruption of President John Adams (who Jefferson had beat in that election of 1800, as Dan Sisson and I wrote about in The American Revolution of 1800: How Jefferson Rescued Democracy from Tyranny and Faction and What This Means Today), writing that his administration:

[S]hall return with joy to that state of things, when the only questions concerning a candidate shall be, is he honest? Is he capable? Is he faithful to the Constitution?

On Monday, however, in a shocking turnabout, the six corrupt, on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court—placed there via a 50-year-long project funded by America’s morbidly rich oligarchs—started America back down the road to Jackson’s corrupt Spoils System… except for the Federal Reserve (more on that and why it’s so mind-bogglingly corrupt in a moment).

Ironically, Jackson’s spoils system was ended in the late 19th century as much to protect the president from harm as to discourage the naked corruption it represented.

Back in 1881, a man named Charles Guiteau thought he’d properly bribed President James Garfield by giving the president, during an in-person visit in the White House, a speech he’d written for Garfield to use. Garfield was polite but refused to offer Guiteau the federal speechwriter’s job he was seeking, which provoked Guiteau to a murderous rage: shortly thereafter, Guiteau met Garfield’s train and shot him twice, killing him.

After Guiteau failed to gain his “spoil” or “patronage” from Garfield and killed him, President Chester Arthur oversaw the writing and passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883.

It separated all those government jobs from the administration in power, turning federal workers from patrons of the president into permanent bureaucrats, whose first loyalty was to the nation instead of to the guy who happened to be in the White House at any particular time. It realized the vision Hamilton described, that Washington had tried so scrupulously to follow.

It also explicitly outlawed bribing the president to get a job or other federal favors. The goal, which it accomplished and held for 143 years, was to end corruption in the bureaucratic branches of the federal government that the Constitution requires the executive branch—the president’s branch—to oversee and “faithfully execute the laws” and administer the agencies Congress had passed and created.

But, like Jackson, Donald Trump wanted to functionally end or at least cripple the Civil Service system with a modern version of the Spoils System and replace the top levels of the nation’s 2.7 million federal workers with people loyal exclusively to himself, essentially overturning the Pendelton Civil Service Act, at least for senior officials.

He tried to do this in the last months of his first presidency through an October 21, 2020 executive order, Schedule F, that reclassified those workers out of their Civil Service jobs and into political appointee positions, doing the same work but now entirely dependent on the good will of the president himself to keep their jobs.

President Joe Biden overturned Trump’s executive order creating Schedule F on his first day in office, restoring honesty and integrity to the executive branch across the entire federal bureaucracy, but last month, on June 3, Trump reinstituted Schedule F, reestablishing the essence of the Spoils System.

When Trump tried to replace Federal Trade Commission member Rebecca Slaughter, she sued, claiming he was violating the FTC Act of 1914 which Congress created as an independent agency free from presidential coercion.

While the court didn’t specifically rule based on the Pendleton Act (she was a Senate-confirmed appointee, not a civil servant), the principles are similar and point to how future all-Republican rulings by this court could affect the Civil Service itself.

And, sure enough, on Monday those six Republican lickspittles on the Supreme Court universalized the new, Trump-era Spoils System by ruling that Trump can replace the heads of any federal regulatory agency (with one exception) with his own toadies, who can then turn the agencies away from their job of protecting our democracy, our public lands, our people, and our environment into new ways to enrich himself, his family, his Epstein-billionaire class, his corporate donors, and his cronies.

That one exception was that on Monday the court also ruled, 5-4 with two Republican appointees joining the three Democratic ones, that Trump can’t fire Lisa Cook on the Federal Reserve, who holds a position eerily similar to that of Rebecca Slaughter on the FTC.

Why the difference?

The Federal Reserve protects the nations’ banking system and thus ensures stability and prosperity for America’s billionaires and the companies that made them that way. By blowing up Trump’s attempt to remove the Fed’s one Black governor (presumably as part of his and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Make America White Again campaign), the Republicans on the court defended America’s oligarchs.

The other federal agencies, like the FTC, mostly protect you and me. They oversee our environment, consumer product safety, the purity of our food and drugs, and so on. If anything, America’s oligarchs consider them a pain in the ass.

Republicans, who—with the conspicuous exception of Dwight D. Eisenhower—have been exclusively serving the morbidly rich and powerful since the election of Harding in 1920 (he cut the top tax rate from 90% to 25% and instituted massive deregulation of the banks, leading straight to the Republican Great Depression) are cheering.

But, as we approach America’s 250th anniversary, the rest of us should be outraged.

The next time Democrats have true power in Washington, DC, overturning Slaughter and other corrupt all-Republican Supreme Court decisions (particularly Citizens United) must be Job One.