Justice Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts talk on the steps of the Supreme Court in June 2017 in Washington, DC. | Win McNamee/Getty ImagesJust what President Donald Trump needed: more unchecked power. In the Supreme Court’s new Trump vs. Slaughter opinion, the court ruled that the president’s firing of the Federal Trade Commission’s Rebecca Slaughter was lawful — even though he did not follow Congress’s explicit requirement that FTC commissioners might only be dismissed “for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” In the court’s eyes, such requirements are themselves unconstitutional interference with the president’s Article 2 powers. The decision was the latest and most sweeping embrace of the “unitary executive” theory, a longstanding concept popular in conservative legal circles that the president should have broad authority to fire any leader of any executive agency for any reason. Slaughter could not have been timed worse. Congress gave these agencies broad powers on the explicit theory that they’d be insulated from White House influence. Now the court has decided Trump, of all people, should become the first president to have unquestioned authority over them.In doing so, they’re playing with fire. Both in the United States and around the world, independent agencies have proven to be an important bulwark protecting free societies from would-be authoritarians. The specific, arbitrary, and politicized way the court is assailing them raises the risks even further. The immediate threat of politicizationThe majority in Slaughter paints executive agencies as a kind of extra-constitutional outgrowth that violates the founding vision of a branch fully controlled by the president. In his concurrence, Justice Neil Gorsuch pins the blame on President Woodrow Wilson — who, in Gorsuch’s estimation, aimed to replace the constitutional system of popular sovereignty with a kind of rule-by-unaccountable-expert. Executive agencies were the means to this nefarious end.“As Wilson put it, the Nation’s traditional commitment to ‘popular sovereignty’ entrusted too much to a ‘selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish’ people. And letting the public anywhere near the new bureaucracies would amount to letting ‘a rustic handl[e] delicate machinery,’” Gorsuch writes.These historical claims are extremely debatable (see Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent for the response). But in the hundred-plus years since Wilson’s presidency, independent regulatory agencies have become common — both in the United States and globally. On a practical level, we know a lot more about how they work, and their relationship with democracy, than Wilson did in his day.And what we’ve found is that independent agencies are in fact quite compatible with democratic governance. They are in common use across the democratic world, existing across the OECD countries. Research finds that countries with stronger rule-of-law tend to have higher levels of agency independence than those with weaker ones. While the proliferation of these agencies does raise tricky questions about democratic accountability, it’s clear that the very existence of independent agencies does not lead to the replacement of democracy with technocracy. Rather, they function as a kind of independent power center: one that can abuse its power, to be sure, but has nowhere accrued so much authority that elections have become obsolete.In fact, the most common threat to democracy globally is almost the polar opposite: executives accruing unchecked power, and wielding it against free speech and fair elections. This “executive aggrandizement” almost always involves the abuse of hiring-and-firing powers to ensure that cronies staff key positions of power.The authoritarian factions that were (until recently) running Hungary and Poland both seized control of the country’s public broadcaster, using their new powers to turn them into propaganda outlets. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has politicized election administration and weaponized law enforcement agencies against political opponents.Agency independence can be a vital protection against such tactics. Last year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to fire the country’s attorney general — who was supervising his criminal trial for alleged undemocratic abuse of regulatory power. The Israeli Supreme Court ruled that Netanyahu’s move violated laws protecting the AG from political interference, at least temporarily preserving a key check on his increasingly lawless government.The United States is, quite obviously, in the midst of a similar episode of democratic backsliding — one marked by the president attempting to wield regulatory and law enforcement powers against his enemies. In this rather maximalist decision, the Court gives him a green light to put his pedal to the metal.“Combine the Supreme Court’s radicalism in this case with the revanchist, overreaching second presidency of Mr. Trump, and the separation of powers as we have known it has been all but laid to waste,” Kate Shaw, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, writes in the New York Times.What happens next is hard to say. Trump had already functionally put cronies in charge of historically independent agencies, ranging from the Justice Department to the FCC, and pushed out many political appointees and career civil servants who might fret over enacting Trump’s every whim. But experts are already warning of a deeper assault, one touching elements of the administrative state that have so far escaped Trump’s grasp.“My fear is that Slaughter also lays the basis for a deeper assault on the civil service. The logic for the decision — that senior officials who employ executive power must be removable by the President — could easily extend to other public servants beyond the heads of independent agencies, including senior civil servants,” writes Don Moynihan, a professor at the University of Michigan who studies the federal bureaucracy.The long-term threat of juristocracyThough the court studiously avoids calling out Trump specifically as a danger to democracy, it is clearly aware of the dangers of its ruling.Gorsuch’s concurrence is shockingly blunt on this point. Quoting James Madison’s Federalist No. 47, the justice wrote that “allowing Presidents to control not only executive functions, but also vast new reservoirs of legislative and judicial powers, risks inviting exactly what those who framed our Constitution feared: the ‘accumulation of all powers…in the same hands.’” He even cites FCC chair Brendan Carr’s attempt to silence Jimmy Kimmel as an example of the sweeping powers of agencies, and the dangers of their misuse.Yet despite this, Gorsuch voted to give the president ultimately responsible for this abuse even more power to influence the FCC — by for example, firing its only remaining Democratic commissioner.What makes Gorsuch’s concurrence especially interesting is that he, unlike the majority, actually proposes a solution to the problem of a hyper-powerful executive. Since the court has just kneecapped Congress’s ability to corral executive power, he concludes that power must fall to himself and his fellow justices.“If any real response is to come it will have to come from this Court,” he writes. “The Constitution provides the blueprint for the job ahead. That charter provides a far surer and more democratically legitimate scheme of ‘public administration’ than anything Wilson conjured up.”Effectively, it seems that the Court has appointed itself the sole decider of the proper bounds of executive authority. Whatever authority democratically elected members of Congress had to delegate power to agencies has been subsumed by nine unelected justices (or, more typically, six). Gorsuch frets that agencies are not neutral experts, but subject to political and partisan bias. But the same thing can be said of the Court itself — perhaps even more so. For evidence, look to another Supreme Court decision released yesterday that seems to directly contradict the ruling in Slaughter.In Trump v. Cook, Chief Justice John Roberts ruled that Trump’s firing of Lisa Cook — a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors — violated statutory protections requiring that she only be dismissed for cause. To permit this special Fed carveout from Slaughter, Roberts relies on the argument that the Fed is somehow more historically independent than other agencies. But, as Justice Amy Coney Barrett points out in her dissent, that directly contradicts the plain text of Slaughter.“Slaughter announces a categorical rule…Yet here, the Court claims a special exception ‘sanctioned by history’ and based on the Federal Reserve’s role in setting monetary policy. How can history support both a categorical rule and a carveout?” she asks, rhetorically.The answer is that it cannot. The rulings do not make sense together unless you see Cook less as law than policy. Indeed, Roberts spends the first six pages laying out a history of federal banks and financial panics, essentially arguing that the Fed plays a unique role in the US economy that should not be interfered with. “It is the Federal Reserve’s independence that allows it to pursue its mandate of ‘maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates,’ goals that may be thwarted if (to quote Hamilton) ‘suspicion’ arose that its operations were ‘at the disposal of the Government,’” he writes.There’s substantive merit to his argument: The Fed’s independence really is integral to the American (and global) economy. But the chief justice makes no serious attempt to explain why this logic is anything but a special carveout to Slaughter based on judicial views of substantive economic questions. In fact, the word “Slaughter” does not appear once in Roberts’s ruling. And the history could just as easily be read the other way: There were plenty of Founders and early presidents who were committed opponents of a national bank, suggesting the question of its independence was contentious from the start.This points to another risk to American democracy, one that will outlast Trump: that when it comes to executive power, the Supreme Court will continue acting as if its own policy preferences are constitutionally mandated while those its conservative majority likely disagrees with must face special scrutiny. Absent some kind of reform or course correction, we risk a future in which the presidency becomes an electoral dictatorship in areas where the Supreme Court approves of its policies — and where the Court sets policy in others. Congress, the most democratically responsive branch of government, is reduced to a rump. America deserves better than a power competition between an elected dictatorship and nine philosopher-kings. But the Court (and a supine Congress) seem determined to force the issue. It will not end well.