Latest news with #MeritSystemsProtectionBoard
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Supreme Court ignores precedent instead of overruling it in allowing president to fire officials whom Congress tried to make independent
What may be one of the U.S. Supreme Court's most important and far-reaching rulings in decades dropped in late May 2025 in an order that probably didn't get a second – or even first – glance from most Americans. But this not-quite-two-page ruling, as technical and procedural as they come, potentially rewrites a major principle of constitutional law and may restructure the operation of the federal government. The case is dry in a way only lawyers could love, but its implications are enormous. The dispute began when President Donald Trump fired two Biden-era officials: Gwynne Wilcox, a member of the National Labor Relations Board, and Cathy Harris, a member of the Merit Systems Protection Board. The National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board, like the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Reserve, are among more than 50 independent agencies established by Congress to help the president carry out the law. Though technically located within the executive branch, independent agencies are designed to serve the public at large rather than the president. To ensure these agencies are devoted to their public mission, not the will or whims of a president, congressional statutes generally permit the president to remove leaders of these agencies only for 'good cause.' Malfeasance in office, neglect of duty, or inefficiency generally constitute 'good cause.' Other executive branch agencies, such as the FBI, Food and Drug Administration and Department of Homeland Security are entirely under presidential command – if he wants their leaders out, out they go. But independent agencies, in existence since the late 19th century, are to carry out congressional policy free from the president's purview and his political pressure. Because independent agencies are creatures of Congress housed within the executive branch, there is long-standing disagreement among scholars about just how much power the president should have over them. In the two firings, there was agreement that Trump had violated the relevant statute by firing Wilcox and Harris without 'good cause.' He justified Wilcox's removal, in part, because she did not share his policy preferences. For Harris, he gave no reason at all. But the bigger issue was whether the law itself was constitutional: Could Congress limit why or how a president can remove employees of the executive branch? The root of the problem lies within the Constitution. Although Article 2 specifically gives the president the power to 'appoint' certain federal officials, it says nothing about the power to fire -– or 'remove' – them. Conservative legal scholars propose, under what's called the 'unitary executive theory,' that because the president 'is' the executive branch, he has complete authority, including removal, over all who serve within it. Only with the unfettered ability to fire anyone who serves under him can the president fulfill his constitutionally mandated duty to ensure that 'the Laws be faithfully executed.' Opponents have countered that this ignores fundamental aspects of our constitutional framework: the framers' devotion to checks and balances, their aversion toward monarchical, kinglike rule, and their determination to put policymaking in the hands of Congress. These questions are not new. The Supreme Court first took up the issue in 1926 in Myers v. United States, when Chief Justice – and former president – William Howard Taft held that Congress could not limit the president's ability to fire an Oregon postmaster, writing that 'the power to remove inferior executive officers … is an incident of the power to appoint them.' Less than a decade later, however, the court ruled in Humphrey's Executor v. United States that the Constitution did not grant the president an 'illimitable power of removal,' at least over certain types of officials. This included the head of the Federal Trade Commission, whose firing by President Franklin Roosevelt had sparked the case. Humphrey's Executor stood basically untouched for decades, until Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito – both of whom had previously served in the executive branch – were appointed. With a now-solid conservative majority, the Supreme Court invalidated restrictions on the president's ability to remove members of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board in 2009. Two years after the arrival of fellow executive branch alumnus Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, the court struck down the 'good cause' removal restriction for the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Rather than explicitly overrule Humphrey's Executor, however, the justices declared that these agencies were factually distinct from the Federal Trade Commission – leaders of one were protected by a 'two-layer' removal system and the other because it was run by a single individual, not a multimember board. Because Humphrey's Executor was still good law, and the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board were structured like the Federal Trade Commission, district courts in 2025 initially held that the firings of Wilcox and Harris were unlawful. On April 9, 2025, Trump filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court, asking it to put the district court decisions on hold. On May 22, the Supreme Court granted that request, at least while the cases proceed through the lower courts. The court did not decide on the constitutionality of the removal statute, but the ruling is nonetheless a major victory for Trump. He can now fire not only Wilcox and Harris but also potentially the heads of any independent agency. Low-level civil servants may also be at risk. In the unsigned order, the high court echoed unitary executive theory, stating, 'Because the Constitution vests the executive power in the Presidents … he may remove without cause executive officers who exercise that power on his behalf, subject to narrow exceptions.' It simply ignored Humphrey's Executor altogether, leaving its value as precedent unclear. The Supreme Court also said that the holding did not apply to the Federal Reserve Board. That 'uniquely structured, quasi-private entity' would remain free from executive control via removal. Such an explicit carve-out in legal doctrine is striking but responds directly to claims made by litigants and political commentators of the dire economic consequences that could result were the president to have free rein over the Federal Reserve's chairman. In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan blasted the majority for allowing the president to overrule Humphrey's Executor 'by fiat,' a result made even worse because the court had done so via the so-called shadow docket, in the absence of full briefing or oral argument. Such 'short-circuiting' of the 'usual deliberative process' is, she wrote, a wholly inappropriate way to make a 'massive change in the law.' What happens now? The National Labor Relations Board is paralyzed, and the Merit Systems Protection Board is somewhat hamstrung, with both lacking the quorum necessary to act. Cases about the firing of Harris, Wilcox and multiple other officials will bedevil lower courts as they try to figure out whether Humphrey's Executor still stands, even as a shadow of its former self. Trump aims to continue axing federal employees, even as the administration struggles to rehire others. And, already asked again to make major legal change on its emergency docket, the Supreme Court will need to determine whether such change warrants more than the few paragraphs of explanation it gave in the ruling on the Wilcox and Harris firings. If, as seems likely, the court ultimately overturns Humphrey's Executor, Kagan's dissent serves as a warning voiced by others as well: A decision that allows the president to have total control over the heads of more than 50 independent agencies – agencies that pursue the public interest in areas from financial regulation to the environment, to nuclear safety – could shift their focus from serving the public to pleasing the president, profoundly affecting the lives of many Americans. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Claire B. Wofford, College of Charleston Read more: Trump's claims of vast presidential powers run up against Article 2 of the Constitution and exceed previous presidents' power grabs Federal threats against local officials who don't cooperate with immigration orders could be unconstitutional − Justice Antonin Scalia ruled against similar plans George Washington, a real estate investor and successful entrepreneur, knew the difference between running a business and running the government In 2022, I donated $20 to ActBlue.
New York Times
25-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Why Is This Supreme Court Handing Trump More and More Power?
Since taking his second oath of office, President Trump has been on a firing spree. In violation of numerous laws or longstanding presidential practice (or both), he has ordered the removal of many high-level officials who normally retain their positions regardless of who is in the Oval Office. Some of these high-level officials have successfully challenged their removal in the lower courts. But on Thursday, in a case involving members of the National Labor Relations and Merit Systems Protection Boards, the Supreme Court quietly blessed some or all of these firings. In doing so, the court effectively allowed the president to neutralize some of the last remaining sites of independent expertise and authority inside the executive branch. The court sought to cast its intervention as temporary, procedural and grounded in considerations of stability, with the unsigned order noting concerns about the 'disruptive effect of the repeated removal and reinstatement of officers during the pendency of this litigation.' In truth, the decision was radical. Whatever one thinks about the underlying question of presidential authority, the court should not have disposed of the case this way. It effectively overruled an important and nearly century-old precedent central to the structure of the federal government without full briefing or argument. And it did so in a thinly reasoned, unsigned, two-page order handing the president underspecified but considerable new authority. Over the last four months, the legal world — and the country — has been plunged into chaos, and the Supreme Court bears a heavy dose of responsibility. Many of it decisions involving the presidency — including last year's on presidential immunity — have enabled the president to declare himself above the law. The court's latest order both enables the consolidation of additional power in the presidency and risks assimilating a 'move fast and break things' ethos into constitutional law. No modern president has ever come close to the large-scale personnel purges that we have seen under Mr. Trump, and for good reason: Many of the officials in question are protected by law from being fired at will by the president. Mr. Trump maintains that laws limiting the president's ability to fire high-level officials are unconstitutional. In making that argument, he is drawing on a series of recent Supreme Court opinions emphasizing the importance of presidential control over subordinate officials and invalidating removal limitations at agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But those recent decisions exist alongside another, older precedent, which until now has stood as a bulwark against any president's ability to lay waste to independent agencies: the Supreme Court's 1935 opinion in Humphrey's Executor v. United States. In that case, the court concluded that Congress could create expert agencies designed to enjoy a degree of independence from the president and could limit the president's ability to fire at will the leaders of such agencies. The court's recent unitary executive cases, with their expansive vision of presidential control, haven't formally overruled Humphrey's Executor. In fact, they stated explicitly that they were not 'revisit[ing] that case,' which involved an agency, the Federal Trade Commission, whose multi-member structure differed from the single-member leadership structure at issue in the court's recent cases. To be sure, the logic of the recent cases cast considerable doubt on Humphrey's Executor. But lower courts reviewing challenges to President Trump's firings have concluded that those firings are unlawful under existing precedent, applying Humphrey's Executor and leaving to the Supreme Court 'the prerogative of overruling its own decisions.' That's what happened in the challenges brought by Cathy Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board and Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board, two agencies that look a lot like the F.T.C. Ms. Harris and Ms. Wilcox prevailed in their cases before U.S. District Courts and then the full D.C. Circuit. But last week the Supreme Court 'stayed' those lower court rulings protecting Ms. Harris and Ms. Wilcox, and permitted their firings to stand while the litigation proceeded. The court provided scant reasoning for its decision, though it hastened to add that nothing it said should be taken to cast doubt on 'the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors or other members of the Federal Open Market Committee' — a nakedly policy-driven effort to head off the prospect of President Trump making good on threats to fire Jerome Powell, the Fed chair. To be clear, I am not a fan of unitary executive theory, or of its proponents' singular fixation on the president's power to fire — a power the Constitution doesn't expressly give the president and one that I don't think history supports. Even if you disagree — even if you think that Article II's grant of 'the executive power' to the president includes the power to fire at will any high-level official in the executive branch — the court's disposition of the case sends a profoundly dangerous message to the White House. In firing officials like Ms. Harris and Ms. Wilcox, the administration acted in flagrant violation of statutes and in direct defiance of the Supreme Court. Handing the president a win here suggests that the administration did not need to abide by Congress's statutes or the Supreme Court's rulings as it sought to change legal understandings. Given the range of high-stakes legal questions pending before the courts — on questions ranging from the due process rights of migrantsto the termination of federal funds to the firing of civil servants — this decision risks emboldening the administration further to act outside of our traditional constitutional order. And it did so during a week when the administration has accelerated its assault on both norms and law — criminally charging a member of Congress, accepting a luxury Qatari jet and defending the president's lavish investor dinner that would have been unthinkable under the ethics guidelines of previous presidential administrations. In the past four months, the lower courts have done more than other government entities to respond to the chaos emanating from the Trump administration. They have enforced constitutional guarantees, required compliance with statutes and insisted on the force of the decisions of the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, by contrast, has undermined lower courts seeking to protect the rule of law and emboldened an administration eager to trample it. You can see why White House lawyers could feel encouraged to advise Mr. Trump of the correctness of a claim he was once mocked for making: 'I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.' The court may believe that it retains the ultimate authority to check presidential lawlessness, even as it signs off on the elimination of many other constraints on presidential power. The danger is that by the time the court actually tries to exercise that authority, it may be too late.
New York Times
23-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
The Supreme Court Ruled in Favor of Trump. And That Is OK.
It is a sign of the times that the Supreme Court may have just used its emergency docket to all but overrule an important precedent limiting executive power. That precedent is Humphrey's Executor, a New Deal-era case establishing the constitutionality of independent agencies. In a surprising twist, its decision to do so was both predictable and reasonable. The cases before the court were Trump v. Wilcox and Harris v. Bessent, which concern the president's power to fire members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board without showing just cause to do so. Because these boards were created by Congress as independent agencies, the cases will ultimately test whether Congress can create such agencies, or whether the unitary executive theory instead requires them to be under complete presidential control. After lower courts held that the firings were unlawful and that the agency officials should retain (or regain) their offices, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of President Trump. We have plenty of things to worry about in constitutional law today. But those worried about how the court will confront the unprecedented and sometimes unlawful actions of the Trump administration should save their outrage for other cases. In the two cases here, the court held that the president was likely to prevail in his unitary executive claim, that the administration was unduly harmed by allowing the officials to keep their offices while the case was pending, and that this reasoning would not imperil the independence of the Federal Reserve. It did all of this in an emergency order, rather than waiting for the issues to arrive on the court's regular docket. All four of these things are noteworthy and provoked a powerful dissent by Justice Elena Kagan. But in this particular case, all four can be justified. First, the view of a majority of Supreme Court justices that independent agencies are likely unconstitutional is a straightforward application of its most recent precedents. In Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the court held that because the Constitution vests all of the executive power in a single person who is accountable to the whole nation — the president — and because it makes the president responsible for executing the laws, the president must have control over other officials who exercise executive power. In doing so, the court noted that past cases, such as the Humphrey's Executor precedent, had upheld the independence of multimember agencies that did not exercise significant executive power. But it strongly suggested that this exception was very small, and that it would be hard for modern agencies to qualify. Legal observers have long expected the court to follow this logic and overrule Humphrey's Executor sooner rather than later. Those who quarrel with this move (including Justice Kagan) disagree with the entire premise of Seila Law and the unitary executive theory. But there is not much new to see here. The court's view that agency officials should not keep their offices while the litigation is pending is also on strong precedential ground. Under the unitary executive premise, executive power is not theirs to exercise; it is on loan from the president. More important, even earlier cases that had departed from the unitary executive premise did not allow reinstatement as the remedy. One traditional remedy was back pay. A wrongly fired officer could sue for his salary — this is what happened in the Humphrey's Executor case. Other cases sought a remedy of blocking particular enforcement actions. But the precedent for judicially ordered reinstatement or retention is shaky at best. The court's declaration that the Federal Reserve is different also has a plausible basis. In the decades after the nation's founding, practice and precedent firmly established the constitutionality of the Bank of the United States, which operated as a corporation with some independence from the president. This suggests that monetary policy is not necessarily executive power. While the Federal Reserve today does many things beyond its core mission of monetary policy, the court would have several options for preserving at least some independent functions for the Federal Reserve. Nor should we be too bothered that the court used the emergency docket in particular to issue such a major statement about independent agencies. Officially, the court was careful not to completely prejudge the legal issues, nor to state definitively that previous precedents about independent agencies would be narrowed or overruled. It made an honest judgment about the likelihood of success on the merits, as the law calls for. Even if it had gone further and made such definitive statements, this is not the kind of case where that should especially concern us. It is bad when the emergency docket forces the justices to quickly take positions on tough issues that they have not had time to consider carefully. But the unitary executive question has been before the court multiple times in recent cases, with extensive briefing and argument. All of the justices have thought carefully about the legal issues and made up their minds about most of them. The president's ruinous tariffs, purported cancellation of birthright citizenship, renditions to foreign prisons and retaliations against his political opponents all raise far graver constitutional problems than the court's ultimately unsurprising order in these cases. We should focus our concern there.
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Supreme Court walls off Fed from Trump firings
The Supreme Court protected the Federal Reserve Thursday even as it allowed President Trump to fire the board members of two other independent agencies, potentially insulating central bank officials such as chair Jerome Powell against any immediate removal by the White House. The nation's highest court on Thursday let firings stand at the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board while legal challenges to those removals work their way through the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. But it said "we disagree" with arguments made by members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board that their legal challenges "necessarily implicate the constitutionality of for-cause removal protections for members of the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors or other members of the Federal Open Market Committee." The central bank, the court added, 'is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.' The only language in law pertaining specifically to the removal of Fed board members can be found in Section 10 of the Federal Reserve Act. The law states that each member of the board shall hold office for 14 years "unless sooner removed for cause by the President." The statute doesn't have any language that specifically addresses the chairman of the Board of Governors, nor does it detail what exactly constitutes "for cause." The term has been interpreted in legal rulings to mean 'inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance." The court went out of its way to distinguish the Fed from the two agencies at issue, stating that the government would likely be able to show that both the NLRB and MSPB "exercise considerable executive power." What Trump is trying to challenge is a 90-year-old Supreme Court precedent limiting the power of the president to dismiss independent agency board members except in cases of neglect or malfeasance. If that precedent eventually falls, a Powell firing could be easier to pull off at the Fed. Trump has also delivered pink slips to leaders of other federal agencies, including the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Election Commission, and those firings are also being challenged in lower courts. "There is no legal difference between Jerome Powell and me," one FTC board member let go by Trump told Bloomberg earlier this year. "If the president can legally remove me, he can legally remove Jerome Powell." The president has mused publicly about his wish to show Powell the door, saying in a post to Truth Social that his "termination cannot come fast enough," before clarifying that he does not intend to remove Powell before his term as chair is up in May 2026. Trump has held private talks with a potential replacement for Powell, former Fed governor Kevin Warsh, the Wall Street Journal reported. National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett has also said that Trump and his team were indeed studying whether to fire Powell. But some of Trump's economic aides have advised against removing Powell before his term is up. Powell, for his part, has repeatedly stressed that his firing is not permitted by law. He acknowledged in April that he has been following the case now before the Supreme Court testing Trump's ability to remove board members at other independent agencies, but Powell said, "I don't think that's a case that will apply to the Fed." Nonetheless, the central bank is "monitoring it carefully." Click here for in-depth analysis of the latest stock market news and events moving stock prices Sign in to access your portfolio
Epoch Times
22-05-2025
- Politics
- Epoch Times
Supreme Court Allows Trump Admin to Remove Labor Board Members for Now
The Supreme Court on May 22 formally blocked lower court rulings that prevented President Donald Trump from firing members of independent labor boards. The new Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. Acting on behalf of the high court, Chief Justice John Roberts on April 9 temporarily halted the orders by two Washington-based federal judges that blocked the president's firings of Cathy Harris from the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) and Gwynne Wilcox from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) before their terms expire. The April 9 order issued by Roberts, called an administrative stay, gave the justices more time to consider the Trump administration's emergency application seeking a block. The stay was granted hours after the administration requested it. Roberts did not explain his ruling. The new order states that the orders issued by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit are 'stayed pending the disposition of the appeal' in that court. Related Stories 4/16/2025 5/19/2025 This is a developing story and will be updated.
