The Supreme Court sent the independent executive branch agency into extinction this week, without even bothering to overturn the precedent that forbids it to do so first. The right-wing majority allowed President Trump’s firing of the Federal Trade Commission’s Rebecca Slaughter to stand — nearly an identical firing to the one that the Court declared illegal almost a century ago in Humphrey’s Executor. “He may now remove — so says the majority, though Congress said differently — any member he wishes, for any reason or no reason at all. And he may thereby extinguish the agencies’ bipartisanship and independence.”Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined her in dissent. It’s a marriage of rabid partisanship and self-serving corruption that has come to define the Trump era.