We ran the wrong headline about Trump firing the FTC commissioners Canada reviews

On Tuesday, the president of the United States fired the Democratic commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission in clear contravention of what has been the law since 1935. News outlets — including The Verge — all went up with their articles as fast as they could. The headlines and stories across the board were pretty similar; the blowback from readers was evenly distributed. “This is wildly illegal,” one person wrote in The Washington Post’s comment section. “Just say that. Don’t say the fired people said it was illegal. Say it as the Washington Post when you know it’s true. Democracy dies, thanks in part to this rag.”

We also caught flack for our own headline, which put “illegal” in quotation marks, attributing it to the Democratic commissioners. “@.com, y’all need a more accurate headline,” a reader told us on Bluesky. “They’re not SAYING they were illegally fired, they WERE illegally fired. The precedent set in Humphrey’s Executor almost a century ago makes that crystal clear – but you don’t address that until the next to last paragraph. DO BETTER!”

This is a pretty typical dynamic when the news hedges, equivocates, or neuters its language in the face of an ongoing legal dispute or uncertain outcome. Some news outlets do this reflexively as a general philosophy; it’s why infamous phrases like “officer-involved shooting” and “racially tinged” are so common in the media. At The Verge, we try to call things as they are — up to a certain point. There are journalistic ethics and legal limitations that will leave us sounding ludicrously cautious in many situations. This situation, however, should not have been one of them, but the extraordinary weirdness of what happened caught us flat-footed.

What Trump did on Tuesday was wackadoodle beyond belief. It violated Supreme Court precedent from 1935 — Humphrey’s Executor v. US, a case that is literally about the limits of presidential power when it comes to firing FTC commissioners. The White House has good reason to know this, not just because it employs lawyers who have, presumably, taken first-year classes at law school, but also because the acting solicitor-general has said the Justice Department is going to try to overturn Humphrey’s Executor; the current Republican chair of the FTC has also said outright that Humphrey’s Executor is wrong.

On top of everything else, by statute, only three members of the FTC can be from the same party, and there were already three seats for Republican commissioners. If Trump ends up trying to replace the two Democratic commissioners with more Republicans, he’ll have done something doubly illegal.

The FTC is an independent agency, and the president cannot simply fire its commissioners. To say otherwise amounts to Federalist Society fanfiction, posted to Tumblr with the #AlternateUniverse tag.

That is, until SCOTUS agrees with the fanfiction.

It’s inevitable that SCOTUS must chime in at some point; at least one commissioner has stated that he intends to sue. The court has already hinted in a 2020 decision that it’s ready to overturn Humphrey’s Executor. We as journalists regularly deal with legal disputes that have not yet reached their conclusion — that is why news outlets run with headlines where people are “alleged killers” or companies are “accused of copyright infringement.” If we have the sources and the reporting, the headline “Colonel Mustard seen in library with bloodied candlestick” is perfectly fine, but until he’s convicted, Mustard is still an “alleged killer.” The press does not declare someone guilty until the legal system has officially sorted through the facts.

But there are no facts in dispute when it comes to the firings of Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter. There is not even a dispute about whether specific cases or laws are applicable for this situation versus others. The only thing that is in dispute is whether Humphrey’s Executor is valid law. And this SCOTUS — stacked with three Trump-appointed justices — has shown all-too-ready willingness to overturn long-standing precedent, like Roe v. Wade and Chevron. Its deference to Trump, specifically, and the court’s permissive treatment of the January 6 insurrection is even more alarming. It seems that Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito want a king — at least, their wives do.

That’s the rub: we live in what is left of our society after Trump v. US, where the Supreme Court expanded presidential immunity to an outrageous, insensible degree. The things the president does in his official capacity as president are not crimes; it is increasingly clear that the Trump administration has taken this to mean that law isn’t real. US Customs and Border Protection is flouting court orders to halt deportations; Pam Bondi is on television saying judges have “no business,” “no right,” and “no power” to tell the executive branch what it can and cannot do. Meanwhile, the case of the FTC commissioners pushed the basic craft of journalistic writing to its limits.

Now that I’ve explained what’s at stake and how absolutely wild the story is, you can weigh the headlines for yourself:

You can already see that we are almost universally normal-washing something that is (again, according to long-standing precedent) illegal.

Lauren Feiner’s byline is on this story; I was the editor. Editors have responsibility in what gets published, but editors are especially particular about headlines, frequently rewriting them from scratch. I understood that the only dispute was whether Humphrey’s Executor was valid law, and I weighed whether or not to bluntly say this was illegal. My gut told me that there was a good chance — probably over 50 percent — that this very basic, long-standing precedent was toast, and that I might as well throw out everything I had learned about the US Constitution in school.

And why not? The Supreme Court blew up the entire field of administrative law last year and destroyed the right to abortion the year before that. For years, we’ve been steadily updating readers on the changing face of law and the erosion of once-reliable standards like the Chevron doctrine. It’s important to know that the law isn’t an all-powerful and static rulebook; it works only as well as the government that upholds it.

To declare unilaterally that this very flagrantly illegal thing was illegal didn’t sit right with my gut, especially if SCOTUS weighed in relatively quickly to say that everything was fine. It was a news article, rather than an analysis where we could quote constitutional law experts saying this was illegal; it was right after it happened, rather than after a district court judge ruled that it was illegal. And, on top of everything else, the headline was already pretty long.

But the readers who objected to our headline have a point. My gut gave me a good reality check about the world we live in, but it failed to write a good headline. Although these are unprecedented times, a news headline should not quietly aid the erosion of our social consensus about the law, even if we ourselves are struggling to do our jobs because of that erosion. And even if the Supreme Court holds itself to be the arbiter of what is law, there is only so far that we, as Americans, can sit back and accept it — at the very least, we must flatly reject the idea that it can make Trump a king.

The headline I should have written is this:

Trump fires Democratic FTC commissioners in violation of SCOTUS precedent

To be frank, I’m still not satisfied with that. What the Trump administration is doing is beyond abnormal. The Supreme Court, too, has enabled and fueled the downward spiral, upending bedrock principles of how we organize our society and blowing up the predictive value of the law as we know it. And if our headlines don’t convey this existential fact to you, the reader, then we’re still writing our headlines wrong.