News analysis
Conservative project at Supreme Court meets Trump’s push to oust officials
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The Trump administration’s robust view of the executive is being weighed by a conservative Supreme Court majority that has also embraced the so-called unitary executive theory.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Ann E. Marimow
WASHINGTON – As a young staff member in the Reagan administration, Mr John Roberts was part of a group of lawyers who pushed for more White House control over independent government agencies.
The “time may be ripe to reconsider the existence of such entities, and take action to bring them back within the executive branch”, the future chief justice of the United States advised the White House counsel in a 1983 memo. Independent agencies, he wrote, were a “Constitutional anomaly”.