Humphrey Still Executory

To the right appears William Humphrey, who like William Marbury, is known to history as the subject matter of a famous opinion. President Roosevelt’s efforts to remove Humphrey from the Federal Trade Commission led to the 1935 Supreme Court case of Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, about constitutional limits on the structure of administrative agencies. (Humphrey died during the litigation so his executor continued with the matter). In Consumers’ Research v. CPSC, the Fifth Circuit summarized the current state of the issue addressed by Humphrey’s Executor as follows:

     The Humphrey’s exception traditionally “has applied only to multimember bodies of experts.” Sitting en banc, we recently described the exception like this: Congress’s decision “limiting the President to ‘for cause’ removal is not sufficient to trigger a separation-of-powers violation.” Instead, for-cause removal creates a separation-of-powers problem only if it “combine[s]” with “other independence-promoting mechanisms” that “work[] together” to “excessively insulate” an independent agency from presidential control.

     The plaintiffs in this case argue that the Supreme Court recently upended this framework in Seila Law. In their view, that 2020 decision held that for-cause removal always creates a separation-of-powers violation—at least if the agency at issue exercises substantial executive power (which nearly all agencies do). This is so, the plaintiffs argue, even if for-cause removal is the only structural feature insulating an agency from total presidential control. We do not read Seila Law so broadly. On the contrary, and as in Free Enterprise Fund, the Supreme Court in Seila Law left the Humphrey’s Executor exception “in place.”

No. 22-40328 (Jan. 17, 2024) (citations and footnote omitted).