WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court will revisit a nearly century-old ruling protecting the heads of independent agencies that President Donald Trump has repeatedly challenged as he’s sought greater control over the government.

The court on Sept. 22 took the rare step of agreeing to take up the issue before the lower courts have finished weighing in. The justices will hear arguments in December.

The court also said Trump could remove for now Rebecca Slaughter, the sole Democrat on the Federal Trade Commission. That decision was made over the objections of the court's three liberal justices.

The high court has been chipping away at its 1935 decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which upheld the constitutionality of preventing members of the Federal Trade Commission from being fired without cause.

But the court has not yet overturned that precedent.

"The majority may be raring to take that action," Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissenting from her colleagues' decision to let Trump fire Slaughter for now. "But until the deed is done, Humphrey's controls, and prevents the majority from giving the President the unlimited removal power Congress denied him."

Lower courts relied on the 1935 decision when ruling Slaughter can stay on the FTC as she fights her removal.

But the Justice Department argued that the commission has changed since 1935 and now looks more like the National Labor Relations Board and other agencies that the Supreme Court has so far not protected from Trump’s expanded view of his executive authority.

"In this case, the lower courts have once again ordered the reinstatement of a high-level officer wielding substantial executive authority whom the President has determined should not exercise any executive power, let alone significant rulemaking and enforcement powers," Solicitor General John Sauer told the Supreme Court.

Sauer also urged the court to definitively rule that “for cause” protections are unconstitutional so judges will stop blocking Trump’s firings.

The court on Sept. 8 temporarily paused the lower court’s ruling to give the justices more time to consider Trump’s request.

Slaughter’s lawyers told the court that if they sided with Trump’s emergency request, the Federal Trade Commission "would be severely wounded and radically transformed." Allowing members to be fired for any reason, they said, damages aspects of the commission central to its mission – including bipartisanship, staggered terms, an accumulation of experience and expertise-driven decision making.

"If the President is to be given new powers Congress has expressly and repeatedly refused to give him, that decision should come from the people’s elected representatives," they wrote. "At a minimum, any such far-reaching decision to reverse a considered congressional policy judgment should not be made on the emergency docket."

But Slaughter’s lawyers agreed with the administration that the court should decide soon the underlying issue of the constitutionality of the requirement that FTC members can’t be removed except for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office."

"It is of imperative public importance that any doubts concerning the constitutionality of traditional independent agencies be resolved promptly," they said.

The FTC aims to protect the public from deceptive or unfair business practices. Each of the five commissioners serve seven-year terms and no more than three can be of the same political party.

Slaughter was one of two Democratic commissioners Trump tried to fire in March. The other, Alvaro Bedoya, has since withdrawn from the legal challenge.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Supreme Court to decide if it will overturn decision protecting FTC members from presidential removal

Reporting by Maureen Groppe, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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