Four Senate Democrats cornered Christy McCormick over one true sentence about noncitizens going to the polls.
Those same senators just watched Trump fire two of her Democratic colleagues under the identical legal standard.
Now the senators who demanded her resignation have no rule left to hide behind.
Four Senators Corner a Commissioner Over One True Sentence
Christy McCormick sat on the Election Assistance Commission as its lone Republican, a job nobody outside Washington could have named a year ago.
Then she said something Alex Padilla, Jeff Merkley, Adam Schiff, and Ron Wyden could not stand to hear.
McCormick said Democrats "need open borders" and noncitizen votes to win elections.
The four senators fired off a letter demanding she "disavow" the comments or step down entirely.
Nobody called that political pressure a threat to democracy.
McCormick resigned rather than fight it, and Washington moved on like nothing happened.
Then Two of Her Former Colleagues Get the Same Treatment
Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland, the two Democrats who ran the commission alongside McCormick, got an email from the White House ending their jobs instantly.
That left the four-seat commission with zero sitting commissioners heading into a midterm election year.
Suddenly the same senators who pushed out a Republican for speaking her mind discovered that commission "independence" was sacred after all.
The Election Assistance Commission does not run a single election.
It distributes federal grants, tests voting machines, and keeps the national voter registration form – hardly the stuff of scandal, until Trump was the one doing the firing instead of a Senate letter doing it for him.
The Ruling That Made This Legal
Trump had a Supreme Court decision in his pocket that Padilla, Merkley, Schiff, and Wyden conveniently ignored.
Trump v. Slaughter started with a much smaller fight, back when Trump fired Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya off the Federal Trade Commission.
Bedoya branded the firings "corruption plain and simple" in a post on X, but it was Slaughter who sued.
She won at the district court level, and none of it mattered in the end.
In a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court's conservative majority tossed out Humphrey's Executor, the 90-year-old precedent Democrats had leaned on for generations to keep presidents from firing members of "independent" agencies.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the old framework "has not withstood the test of time."
A White House official summed up what that meant for Hicks and Hovland: "The Slaughter decision gives the President precedence to do so."
Translation: the legal fight Democrats wanted to have already happened, and they lost it long before McCormick ever opened her mouth.
This Is Not an Isolated Firing
The Election Assistance Commission is just the latest name on a long list.
Trump already removed Gwynne Wilcox from the National Labor Relations Board and Cathy Harris from the Merit Systems Protection Board using the same executive-power theory the Supreme Court just blessed in Slaughter.
Federal Election Commission Chair Ellen Weintraub fought her own removal the same way, posting online that there was a "legal way" to replace her and this wasn't it.
She never got her seat back either.
Every one of these fights follows the same script: a Democratic appointee claims the firing is illegal, a lower court occasionally agrees, and the Supreme Court eventually rules for Trump anyway.
Six justices have now said, twice in one term, that if you exercise the president's executive power, the president gets to decide whether you keep your job.
That is not a loophole Trump found.
It is the Constitution working exactly the way Article II describes it.
Why Hicks and Hovland Are Out of Legal Options
Trump cannot fill the empty seats on his own.
New commissioners still need Senate confirmation, and no more than two can come from the same party, which guarantees Democrats another seat at the table whether they like it or not.
That has not stopped legal scholars sympathetic to the administration from arguing Democrats are simply out of runway – the Slaughter precedent is settled, the vote was decisive, and no court is lining up to unwind it.
Expect the same result if Hicks or Hovland decide to sue.
Hicks and Hovland can call their firing political if they want.
Six justices already called it constitutional, and no amount of outrage from Padilla's office is going to reopen a case the Supreme Court just closed.
Sources:
- Breitbart, "Trump Shakes Up Election Commission Dragging Its Feet on Non-Citizen Voting, Citing SCOTUS's Slaughter Decision," Breitbart, July 10, 2026.
- Supreme Court of the United States, Trump v. Slaughter opinion, June 29, 2026.
- SCOTUSblog, "Supreme Court allows Trump to fire FTC commissioner and overturns major restraint on presidential power," SCOTUSblog, June 29, 2026.
- U.S. Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, "Padilla, Merkley, Schiff, Wyden Demand Election Commissioner Correct Dangerous Voting Misinformation or Resign," press release, U.S. Senate, 2026.
