The conservative majority of the Supreme Court reinforced on Thursday in the bet of President Donald Trump to assume total control of the executive branch agencies, giving a green light, for now, to its elimination of the heads of the National Board of Labor Relations and the Merit Systems Protection Board, whom he shot without cause.
A district court had put on the side of Cathy Harris, of the Merit Systems Protection Board, and Gwynne Wilcox of the National Board of Labor Relations, concluding that their layoffs of their independent agencies were probably illegal and must be reversed.
In a decision of 6-3, the Superior Court granted Trump’s request for a suspension of the order of the lower court to restore Harris and Wilcox, at least for now.
“The Government faces a greater risk of damage to an order that allows an officer eliminated to continue exercising the Executive Power than an officer who unfairly removed the faces of not being able to fulfill his legal duty,” the majority explained.
The dispute is currently making its way through a Federal Court of Appeals and can finally return to the Supreme Court for merit.
The Federal Law and the precedent of the Supreme Court explicitly prohibit that the president eliminates the heads of those independent advice agencies without cause in most cases, but the conservatives and the administration have argued for a long time that the rule is unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court is seen in Capitol Hill in Washington, on December 17, 2024.
J. Scott Applewhite / AP
Judges Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson disincted from the decision.
“Today’s order favors the president about our precedent; and does it without restrictions on the rules of information and arguments, and the passage of time, necessary to discipline our decision making,” Kagan wrote. “I would deny the president’s request. It would do so based on the will of the Congress, the seminal decision of this court approving the protections of the independent agencies for cause and the following 90 years of the history of this nation.”
The case has been closely observed as one of the most high profile evidence of the president to control the independent agencies created by Congress and designed to be isolated from politics.
The special approach has been in the possible implications of the case for the Federal Reserve. Trump has made his disgust by the president of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, known and threatened to try to say goodbye, despite the fact that the appointment for the president has historically been protected from presidential interference without cause.
The majority of the Supreme Court nodded those concerns in their order.
“Respondents Gwynne Wilcox and Cathy Harris argue that the arguments in this case necessarily imply the constitutionality of the elimination protections due to the members of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve or other members of the Federal Open Market Committee. We do not agree,” the majority wrote. “The Federal Reserve is an exclusively structured and quasi -private entity that remains in the different historical tradition of banks of the first and second of the United States.”
