Noah Feldman, Columnist

CFPB Ruling Shows John Roberts Doesn’t Rock the Boat

The chief justice is a Burkean conservative, not a firebrand.

June 29, 2020 at 6:30 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

John Roberts and Elena Kagan.
Photographer: Mario Tama/Getty Images

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You might think this is a bad historical moment to give the president more power to boss around his subordinates. Chief Justice John Roberts disagrees. In a decision that counts as a modest win for the idea of a “unitary executive,” he has written an opinion for the Supreme Court holding that the president must have the power to fire the director of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau for any reason.

The court didn’t strike down the CFPB as a whole, thankfully. The bureau can stay in place. And the court didn’t strike down the organizational form of other independent agencies, like the FTC or FCC, which are run by multi-member, bipartisan commissioners. Roberts limited the decision to the CFPB.