It is darkly ironic that we are only a few weeks away from celebrating the 250th anniversary of declaring independence from a king while our own Supreme Court continues to advance a vision of American government where the president has powers that can only be described as kinglike. They don't call it that -- they use the term "unitary executive" instead -- but the upshot is the same.

The first huge leap the high court took down this path was to declare that American presidents can never be held accountable for any criminal behavior when they are in office. This is a preposterous rebuttal to the very core American belief that "no one is above the law." As long as a president says whatever he or she is doing is an "official act," it simply does not matter to this court what crimes he or she may commit. Even after they leave office, they cannot be legally held to account for anything they did, period.

That's a pretty kinglike power, you've got to admit.

Today, the Supreme Court took another giant step down this royalist path. They overturned a precedent that had been in place for 90 years and said the president can fire anybody he chooses for whatever reason he may have -- although they did carve out one exception, for the members of the Federal Reserve Board. But the members of any other group -- even ones that Congress specifically set up to be independent of politics -- can be fired at will by the president for any reason under the sun (or no reason at all).

Agencies like the Federal Trade Commission or the National Labor Relations Board (there are roughly two dozen of them) were set up to have some independence from the president, which is important because (up until now) it guaranteed that such groups could do their regulatory jobs free from the worry that they will be fired if they make a decision that the president doesn't personally like. A president could only fire such people "for cause" -- such as if they used their position to commit a crime, for instance. That all got tossed out the window with today's ruling. Now they can be fired for any or no reason at all.

As usual, the conservatives on the court twisted themselves into pretzels to explain two contradictory rulings. Writing in the Federal Reserve case, Chief Justice John Roberts said: "Any change in that scheme must come from Congress, not the courts. That is why we cannot accept the Government's contentions in this case. To do so would allow the President to remove a member of the Federal Reserve at any time, for any reason, without any notice before, and without any judicial check after." This seems like sound logic, since Congress did indeed create independence for the Fed, but they also created independence for all the other agencies as well. The Supreme Court decided exactly the opposite for all of them -- that change could indeed come from the courts, not Congress. That the president could remove members from such groups for any reason and any time. And they just removed any possible judicial check after the fact.

So the president still can't fire a member of the Federal Reserve Board for no reason, but he can go ahead and fire anyone else he feels like. The upshot of handing such kingly powers to the president is not only going to take America back 90 years, but back to the 1880s. That's when the "spoils system" was done away with and replaced by the concept of the "civil service" -- people employed by the government to perform jobs who were protected from being fired for political reasons. The federal civil service was created with the 1883 Pendleton Act, as a response to the 1881 assassination of President James Garfield by a disgruntled seeker of a consulship. Charles Guiteau didn't get the position he wanted, so he shot Garfield to take his revenge.

Donald Trump has already tried to obliterate this concept and instead institute loyalty oaths for all people hired by the federal government. Not loyalty to the U.S. Constitution, mind you, but loyalty to him personally. The next incoming Democratic president is going to have to do a Herculean job of getting rid of all the Trump toadies who have been hired at all levels of government.

This could be followed by the next incoming Republican president (after a Democratic housecleaning) doing exactly the opposite -- firing all the people hired by the Democrat and replacing them with their own partisans. This pendulum could keep swinging for a long time to come, and it's only going to get worse now that presidents have been given a green light to fire members of independent boards.

The Supreme Court doesn't care. It has a pet ultraconservative theory of what the presidency should be, and it is going to rule for the "unitary executive" in case after case -- at least, while Trump's still in the White House. When a Democrat takes over, the court will then almost certainly bend over backwards to find reasons to rule against him or her exercising the same powers that Trump will now get to use.

It's all a giant step backwards for the American system of government. And the darkest irony of all is that it's not merely transporting us back to the 1930s or even the 1880s, but a full 250 years backwards, to when America was ruled by a king. Because that's the honest way to describe such a "unitary executive."

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant