The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday issued its long-awaited opinion in Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, with a 5-4 split along ideological lines holding that the structure of the CFPB is unconstitutional. Specifically, the clause in the underlying statute that requires cause to remove the director of the CFPB violates the constitutional separation of powers. In a plurality opinion representing three of the justices in the majority, the court further held that the removal provision could — and should — be severed from the statute establishing the CFPB, rather than invalidating the entire statute. While various aspects of the decision could lead to further constitutional challenges, the reasoning of the opinion was based in large part on the preservation of a regulatory framework that is now almost a decade old.

Chief Justice Roberts issued an opinion holding the removal provision unconstitutional but finding that it could be severed from the remainder of the statute. The first portion of the opinion was joined by Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh, and therefore is the opinion of the court. The severance analysis, however, was joined only by Justices Alito and Kavanaugh. Justice Thomas, in a separate opinion joined by Justice Gorsuch, concurred on the constitutional question but dissented on severance. Justice Kagan, joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor, issued a third opinion dissenting from the court’s opinion on the constitutional question but concurring in the judgment that “if the agency’s removal provision is unconstitutional, it should be severed.” (Kagan Dissent, at 37). Justice Kagan’s opinion did not offer any further analysis of the severance issue, nor did she state that she concurred in Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion on that issue. Therefore, none of the three opinions commanded a majority of the court on the severance issue.