The most unexpectedly fascinating class I took in law school was Federal Courts: when federal courts have jurisdiction, and which federal courts have jurisdiction. It didn’t leap off the page of the course catalogue; it looked like the kind of dry class you slog through because studying the law is unfortunately often dry and often a slog.

At the core, however, was a deep insight, one I think about often: process is not neutral. The design of every procedure is rich with values. In the case of jurisdiction, the rules for which court hears a case could mean that consumers have to sue in another state, where courts are more favorable to business defendants. Where a civil rights case goes could mean the difference between a local judge with local sympathies or a federal judge more ready to protect constitutional rights. The choice of process is a choice of real-world outcome.

That lens came to mind this week when the Supreme Court issued its opinions in Trump v. Slaughter and Trump v. Cook. The first establishes that the president has the right to fire at will the heads of once-“independent” agencies, because the Constitution doesn’t allow Congress to limit the president’s constitutional authority to do so. The second, however, carves out an exemption for the Federal Reserve, which remains insulated from presidential whim.

Paul Krugman articulated the liberal response well in his reaction: “The Court Sides With Dictatorship — and Chaos.” Agency independence exists to limit the power of the executive and to ensure that apolitical expertise is placed in charge of critical public functions, from banking regulation to meat inspection to national security. Past presidents have often lamented at the difficulty of operating when agency staff is independent, but this arrangement has largely held for nearly a century. Krugman said:

“…this has been the clearest signal yet that we have six people (there are three who are not part of it, but we have six people) who are fundamentally hostile to democracy, fundamentally hostile to the modern world and determined to put the catastrophically bad leader that we currently have sitting in the White House in charge of everything, which is a nightmare scenario on every level.”

Of course handing this president this control over independent agencies is a disaster. From the reflecting pool to the Middle East, everything he touches falls apart, and agency independence has been a national defense against his ineptitude.

For all that, over the long term this may not be the crisis Krugman says. First, as a legal matter, Slaughter makes some sense. There is nearly a century of precedent protecting independent agencies, with good practical reason, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Constitution doesn’t provide for executive authority independent of the presidency. In law school, it often felt that Supreme Court justices do their most celebrated intellectual work convincing the world that a passage in the Constitution doesn’t say what it plainly says (see, e.g., the dissenters in the birthright citizenship case that also came out this week). That kind of clever contempt for the Constitution is also hostile to democracy.

The second reason goes back to the point about process where I started. Protecting independent agency heads isn’t just about separation of powers. It’s a choice of the kind of outcomes government can deliver. Independence insulates agencies from political meddling, but it also limits the scope presidents have to pursue their agendas. That’s a condition we accept when we don’t expect transformational leadership. But if you’d like to be able to direct the federal government towards a comprehensive plan for the future, there could be a different calibration of executive power that makes more sense. Chief Justice Roberts seemed to be doing something like that himself in writing these opinions, since the distinction between Slaughter and Cook is flimsy. Rather than making an impartial legal determination, it looks like he was deciding what authority he wanted the President to have and stopped short of the Fed.

Suggesting that it might be fine for the president to dismiss agency heads seems crazy now, when we need every shred of institutional friction we have to protect the country from Trump. It’s common now for Democrats to call for tightening and codifying institutional constraints on the White House so this never happens again, but it’s a mistake to design the office in reaction to its worst occupant. There is major work ahead for the country, and we need a presidency that has the legal authorities needed to lead effectively. The alternative is what we got used to for the thirty years until Trump’s second term: presidents who have a handful of signature initiatives but mostly have to be content to stay the course (at least domestically).

That’s not to say I want an imperial presidency. We have gotten so used to our other checks failing that we think that legal restraint is all we have. Congress, of course, should rediscover its authority. Even if they can’t prevent the president from dismissing agency heads, they can decide what powers agencies have in the first place. More importantly, we can check presidential power with our votes. There is nothing inevitable about voting in would-be dictators; we should be able to vote in a leader who would use the authority granted well. It is a failing on all of our parts, and particularly the Democratic Party, that we are so bad at choosing leaders that we depend on rickety constitutional guardrails to protect us from someone we chose for office.