The U.S. Supreme Court temporarily granted a motion from the Trump administration to allow the firing of two federal officials who said they were improperly terminated.
The court voted 6-3 in favor of the Trump administration, with liberal Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson in dissent.
‘He may remove without cause executive officers who exercise that power on his behalf, subject to narrow exceptions …’
The two former employees of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board argued that they could only be fired for cause and that no qualifying cause was given. The case also touches on the larger debate over how much power the executive has over agencies set up to be “independent” by Congress.
“Because the Constitution vests the executive power in the President,” the ruling said, “he may remove without cause executive officers who exercise that power on his behalf, subject to narrow exceptions recognized by our precedents …”
The ruling went against lower-court rulings that said Gwynne Wilcox and Cathy Harris could not be fired summarily by the president from the NLRB and the MSPB, respectively.
The decision went on to say that the court was not ruling on whether the NLRB and the MSPB fell into an exception to the rule and said the issue would be decided “for resolution after full briefing” and argument.
“The stay also reflects our judgment that the Government faces greater risk of harm from an order allowing a removed officer to continue exercising the executive power than a wrongfully removed officer faces from being unable to perform her statutory duty,” the ruling concluded.
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Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images
The Trump administration did not argue that the limitations on the executive were unlawful but instead said that the agencies under consideration had grown in power to the extent that they went beyond the intention of a 1935 decision related to hiring policies.
“The president should not be forced to delegate his executive power to agency heads who are demonstrably at odds with the administration’s policy objectives for a single day — much less for the months that it would likely take for the courts to resolve this litigation,” wrote Solicitor General John Sauer.
The application was made to Chief Justice John Roberts, who referred it to the whole court.
Union advocates contend that if the Supreme Court sides against the workers that it would dramatically expand the powers of the executive beyond what the founders intended.
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