One of the most vital components of the rule of law is a commitment to neutral, principled analysis in which standards are adhered to and similar cases lead to similar conclusions. Such neutrality lies at the core of the courts’ promise to be “bulwarks of a limited Constitution,” as Alexander Hamilton put it in “Federalist No. 78.”That is why the Supreme Court’s seeming abandonment of the neutrality principle is so distressing. The most recent example came in the Court’s decision last month to allow President Donald Trump to fire members of two boards—the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board—whom Congress had attempted to protect against removal through legislative declarations of independence. In doing so, the Court carved out an arbitrary and unjustified exception to the logic it had otherwise adopted, demonstrating the capricious, politicized nature of its decision making.To understand the extent of the problems here, begin by considering one of those neutral principles that is, theoretically, to be applied without regard for result: the “unitary executive” doctrine. According to this doctrine, the Constitution says that all officials who exercise executive power in the U.S. government are answerable to the president. It derives its force from both constitutional text and a view that unelected, independent agency bureaucrats are able to obstruct a president’s power, and some recourse must be available. Consistent with that view, legal scholars and practitioners who adhere to this theory believe that a president should be able to remove any officer of the United States who exercises executive authority—with good reason or, in their view, without any reason at all (what we lawyers call “removal without cause”).The debate over the limits on a president’s removal authority is not an academic exercise about theoretical independence. To the contrary, it can have a very real, practical impact. The 19th-century lawyer and statesman Daniel Webster warned that unlimited removal power “tends to turn the whole body of public officers into partisans, dependents, favorites, sycophants, and man-worshippers.” Or as Judge Joseph Story put it in his famous commentary on the Constitution, such a power “may be made, in the hands of a bold and designing man of high ambition and feeble principles, into an instrument of the worst oppression and most vindictive vengeance.”The constitutional authority for independent agencies was first addressed nearly a century ago, in the New Deal era, when the Court carved out an area of executive activity that Congress could permissibly invest with some degree of independence. The oldest of these cases, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, allowed Congress to enact limits on the president’s removal power for commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission—providing that they be removed only for “good cause,” by which Congress meant some deliberate act of misfeasance. Notably, from a historical perspective, Congress imposed the limits (which the Court held were constitutional) in part to prevent President Franklin D. Roosevelt from firing holdovers from the previous Republican administration who were allegedly thwarting his more liberal policies.[Adam Serwer: Trump is tired of courts telling him he’s breaking the law]The Court’s Trump v. Wilcox decision last month, permitting Trump to remove the two senior board members, invoked the unitary-executive doctrine. Even though the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board are structurally indistinguishable from the FTC (at issue in Humphrey’s Executor), the majority concluded that Trump may “remove without cause executive officers who exercise power on his behalf.” And so 90 years of law meets its end.Many conservative legal scholars will approve of this conclusion. Other commentators will think that it too casually discards nearly a century of precedent. But whatever one may think of the underlying principle, both groups could and should hope for its unbiased application. If this is the new rule, then it should apply to all executive agencies.The specter of that possibility is why one of the strongest arguments against the unitary-executive principle has always been that if it were neutrally applied, it would necessarily allow the president plenary authority over every officer currently considered independent—including, most relevantly, the members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and the Federal Open Market Committee. Because the Fed’s core task of setting monetary policy is an executive act (for it surely is not legislative), the Fed, in theory, ought to be subject to presidential control.Such a result would be so disruptive that it is unthinkable. The independence of the Federal Reserve is considered a cornerstone of global economic stability. Multiple times in the past few months, the mere suggestion that Trump might fire the chair, Jerome Powell, has sent the markets into a tailspin. That is not because Powell himself is so beloved (though he has proved a very steady leader), but because markets cannot tolerate the uncertainty and disruption that his dismissal would portend.Critics have long made a simple counterargument: The unitary-executive doctrine cannot be valid, because it leads to unacceptable results. No principled way of distinguishing the NLRB and the MSPB (as well as a host of other independent agencies) from the Federal Reserve exists. If the loss of independence at the Fed is unthinkable, it can only be because the unitary executive is itself unthinkable.[Quinta Jurecic: What recourse does the Supreme Court actually have?]In an ideal legal world, this sort of argument would be persuasive. For the current Supreme Court, rejecting it required nothing more than inventing a new standard. In a single sentence, the Court tossed off the argument for equivalence, saying, “The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.”This is a remarkably weak argument. Neither of the original banks was a significant executive actor. They were not, for example, authorized to set monetary policy, as is now the Fed’s job. And, disturbingly for those who value judicial precision, the authority the Court cited said no such thing. It is almost as if the citation was made up by a hallucinating artificial intelligence.So the historical analogy breaks down on the merits. It also requires answering this question: How old is old enough? One is left to wonder why the historical tradition of the first two banks (respectively, 240 and 190 years old) is sufficient, but the NLRB’s history (it is now 90 years old) and, presumably, the FTC’s age (now 110) are not.There is, sadly, only one plausible conclusion: The Court wanted to endorse the unitary-executive theory, but it created an exception for the Federal Reserve because the implications of its reasoning were too severe to tolerate. Call it the “our theory can’t create market catastrophe, so we will arbitrarily carve out the markets” principle, which is no principle at all. It’s just artificial line drawing to avoid the consequences of one’s own logic.This is not the only recent instance of the Court ruling by ipse dixit—making law based on unsupported dogmatic assertion rather than judgment. The capricious rejection of principle in the service of conservative political desires has become a habit with this Court.[Adam Serwer: The Supreme Court’s ‘selective proceduralism’ would suffocate the Constitution]Consider, as another example, the Supreme Court’s decision overturning 50 years of precedent in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The decision rested on the Court’s conclusion that the Constitution contains no substantive text protecting a woman’s right to an abortion, and that such unenumerated rights should not be recognized if they are not “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history.”Again, one may agree with that principle (and with the Court’s history regarding abortion rights), or one may not. But either way, one would expect that the Court would apply the principle neutrally. And if one thinks that the text of the Constitution has no protection for abortion, then, as Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his concurring opinion, all of the jurisprudential developments that protect sexual intimacy are wrong. In his view, not just abortion but also contraception and same-sex marriage are constitutionally unprotected.Fair enough, and at least Thomas has the virtue of intellectual consistency. But the implications of his views were so severe that at least one member of the Court felt the need to disavow them. Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s concurrence assured the nation that the rule Dobbs created was unique to the abortion context. Trust me, he told us, gay marriage is not at risk.But that assurance is no more than another instance of making up the rules to suit the situation. If, as Dobbs says, the test is whether a practice is “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history,” then gay marriage is, if anything, on far thinner ice than abortion, and contraception is not too far behind.[Stephen I. Vladeck: What the courts can still do to constrain Trump]Again, if the impartial application of a new rule of law seems to have unacceptable results, the proper answer is to jettison the new rule as untenable, not to adopt it and then artificially carve out an exception.The promise of unbiased application of the law is why, even if you don’t believe he meant it, Chief Justice John Roberts’s famous characterization of judges as umpires calling “balls and strikes” was so powerful. Americans don’t expect perfection in judges’ application of that principle. But the rule of law is, at bottom, a promise to minimize variations when possible.To be sure, the mitigation of harms is welcomed—I certainly don’t want Trump to have the power to fire the Fed chair. But the intellectual dishonesty necessary to reach this result is stunning. Were the justices truly committed to calling balls and strikes, they would recognize that the horrific consequences of their reasoning suggest fault in that reasoning.It’s all a bit reminiscent of Bang the Drum Slowly, a Robert De Niro and Michael Moriarty movie in which the pair play together on a baseball team. They welcome rookies by hazing them in a number of ways, one of which is to introduce them to the card game TEGWAR—“the exciting game without any rules.” The pair make up the rules as they go along, reinforcing each other’s absurdities (“I just got a double krankle”) and confounding the uncomprehending rookies. As a delightful vignette, TEGWAR is a comedic moment in a somber character study. When TEGWAR becomes the analytical methodology for the Supreme Court, it is a tragedy—for the rule of law and for the nation.