Chief Justice bails out Trump on labor board firings

President Donald Trump greets Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts as he arrives to deliver his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress in the House Chamber on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2020 (Leah Millis/Pool via AP).

Chief Justice John Roberts on Wednesday once again swooped in at the eleventh hour to bail out the Trump administration, this time staying an appellate court order preventing the president from ousting two Biden-appointed members of independent federal labor agencies.

Roberts did not rule on the merits of the case, but stayed a lower court order that reinstated two chairwomen to their positions on independent federal labor boards in a case that is likely to have wide-reaching implications on Donald Trump’s continued effort to slash the government workforce and wield unprecedented control over the federal bureaucracy.

The chief justice’s order was handed down within hours of the Justice Department filing a petition urging the high court to intervene after the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., affirmed a lower court order reinstating Cathy A. Harris to the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) and Gwynne Wilcox to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

The appeals court previously reasoned that the fired chairwomen were improperly dismissed without cause, violating federal law.

Meanwhile, the administration has argued that prohibiting the president from selecting personnel in the executive branch impedes his ability to do his job, asserting, “this situation is untenable.”

“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,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in the 39-page petition. “[T]he district court’s orders violate Article II on an independent and equally troubling basis. Federal courts lack any constitutional, statutory, or equitable authority to order the reinstatement of agency heads whom the President has removed and to force the President to rely on principal officers whom the President believes should not be exercising any executive power. Exercising non-existent equitable authority to saddle the President with already-removed principal officers ‘deeply wounds the President’ in his exercise of the executive power.”