Supreme Court says Trump doesn’t have to rehire independent labor board members for now

By John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — Chief Justice John Roberts on Wednesday allowed President Donald Trump to temporarily remove two board members at independent labor agencies while the justices consider whether the president may permanently fire them.

The emergency case follows a decision from an appeals court in Washington that temporarily reinstated Gwynne Wilcox, a member of the National Labor Relations Board, and Cathy Harris, chairwoman of the Merit Systems Protection Board.

Roberts ordered the board members to respond to Trump’s emergency appeal on April 15.

“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,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the Supreme Court in a filing earlier Wednesday.

The underlying lawsuit raises fundamental questions about the president’s authority to remove officials within the executive branch that Congress said could only be dismissed for cause, such as inefficiency or malfeasance – not because the president disagrees with their decisions. The conservative Supreme Court in recent years has moved toward expanding the president’s power to control independent agencies.

“This case raises a constitutional question of profound importance: whether the president can supervise and control agency heads who exercise vast executive power on the president’s behalf, or whether Congress may insulate those agency heads from presidential control by preventing the President from removing them at will,” Sauer wrote.

A three-judge panel of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals initially ruled for the Trump administration, but the full appeals court voted 7-4 to wipe out that decision, reinstating the board members.

With the two officials returning to their posts, a quorum was restored at the NLRB and MSPB, allowing the agencies to function at full strength and process cases involving federal employment disputes. The agencies are a critical bulwark against Trump’s efforts to rapidly reduce the size of the federal workforce and fire thousands of employees.

All seven of the DC Circuit judges who supported reinstating the labor officials were appointed by Democratic presidents, and the four dissenting judges were appointed by Republicans.

The federal appeals court in Washington, DC, initially ruled that Trump could remove Wilcox and Harris.

“The Supreme Court has said that Congress cannot restrict the president’s removal authority over agencies that ‘wield substantial executive power,” wrote US Circuit Judge Justin Walker, a Trump appointee.

CNN’s Marshall Cohen contributed to this report.

This story has been updated following Roberts’ ruling.

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