Chief Justice John Roberts scrambled around with a verbal broom and dustpan Monday, reflexively jumping into the arguments to downplay the obvious dangers his majority will soon unleash in its seemingly imminent decision to destroy independent agencies. The case stems from President Trump’s early-term bloodletting at the Federal Trade Commission (and several other protected agencies), and is expected to end with a major victory for the all-powerful presidency that the right-wing legal world has been working towards for decades. When Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out that the Trump administration’s logic for making the leaders of until-now independent agencies subject to at-will firing extends to other entities including the tax court, military courts and the entire civil service, Roberts dutifully offered a rebuttal. He suggested that a case that reaffirmed Humphrey’s Executor , the one the majority will likely overturn (and which he referred to as a “dried husk” on Monday), could still stand as good precedent and somehow be contorted to protect those select institutions. He later proposed a different fix, emphasizing the judicial (rather than executive) functions of some agencies and bodies the conservatives are okay with, and letting them continue to exist with a degree of independence that way. While the liberals sounded the alarm, he countered that overturning Humphrey’s would not be so cataclysmic, implying that the Court would find some logically inconsistent way to protect the independence of the agencies it cares about (chief among them, the Federal Reserve). And in the second half of the arguments, he led the attack in the other direction. The Court’s right wing, as a bloc, countered the realistic fears about a compromised Fed or Article I courts with dramatic hypotheticals about removal protections so robust that no one can ever be fired. “Are there some Cabinet departments that you say Congress could just take over?” Roberts asked the lawyer for the fired FTC commissioner. “Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Education, they think, well, experts can do a better job of it so we’re going to say there is now an agency, the agency for education…and its authorities will be everything the current Department of Education has except it will be run by a commission and they can only be removed for cause.” Justice Elena Kagan, seemingly tiring of the performance, quipped that a more “realistic” fear at this point is an Education Department that exists in name, but is staffed by zero employees. The chorus of fearmongering about out-of-control agencies is old-school Republican politics. The right has opposed muscular executive branch agencies and their regulations for decades, and Roberts grew out of that tradition. So did his allies on the Court, including Justice Neil Gorsuch, who at one point suggested ameliorating the liberals’ concern about runaway presidential power by declaring that Congress can’t outsource any of its legislative power at all, rendering agencies unable to create rules and all but powerless (this is the nondelegation theory recently embraced by the right). “Is the water warm?” Gorsuch asked giddily. It’s not surprising to watch the right-wing justices feign concern about a tyrannical Education Department — but it feels of a time gone by, as agencies are as weak as they’ve ever been. Trump unilaterally advanced the project of hobbling the greatest source of protections for workers, the environment, students and veterans beyond the Federalist Society’s greatest dreams. Assuming that the Supreme Court would rubber stamp his federal government massacre, he and Elon Musk trampled removal protections, killing whole agencies and running experienced civil servants out of the government in droves. He installed toadies in the roles of experts, weaponizing some agencies against his enemies and hollowing out those that do work he considers unimportant (global aid, corruption prevention). The conservatives’ bleating about the big bad bureaucracy gets harder to stomach when juxtaposed with the monarchical presidency they’ve created, making him immune from prosecution for his crimes, shielding him from lower courts more inclined to block his maximal exercises of power, and now, likely putting the entire executive branch under his thrall. “Neither the king nor parliament nor prime ministers, England at the time of the founding, ever had an unqualified removal power,” Sotomayor said Monday, adding: “You’re asking us to destroy the structure of government.”