US appeals court blocks Trump from removing Democrats from labor boards
A federal appeals court blocked President Donald Trump from removing Democratic members from two federal labor boards on Monday. The court rulingreinstates quorums on boards that were thrown into chaos and expedites a potential appeal to the Supreme Court.
The decision is the latest in a back-and-forth battle that started when Trump fired Gwynne Wilcox from the National Labor Relations Board and Cathy Harris from the Merit Systems Protection Board. Federal judges reversed both firings.
The Trump administration appealed to a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which issued a 2-1 decision effectively refiring the two women. The women asked the full court to review it, and they decided 7-4 in their favor. A full hearing will take place May 16.
The White House and lawyers for Wilcox and Harris did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
The Trump administration may appeal to the Supreme Court the decision to reinstate the two women. Legal observers on both sides of the conflict have said this issue is headed to the Supreme Court.
"The D.C. circuit is moving very fast," said Thomas Berry, the director of constitutional studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
Michael Sozan, a senior fellow at the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress, said the Supreme Court could create an emergency slot for the Trump administration to argue to refire the women.
Trump has fired seven board members at independent agencies because they had differing political views from his, a trend that has invited multiple challenges based on laws that protect them from being fired except for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”
Fired leaders, including Wilcox and Harris, allege that Trump is breaking the law, but the Trump administration argues that the law is unconstitutional and violates his role as the nation’s unitary executive.
The appeals court is scheduled to hear arguments on that issue next month, and Berry predicted the Supreme Court could hear arguments near the end of the year.
The argument challenges a precedent set in the 1930s in a case called Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which stopped President Franklin D. Roosevelt from firing someone on the Federal Trade Commission who had similar job protections to Wilcox and Harris.
“It is quite evident that one who holds his office only during the pleasure of another, cannot be depended upon to maintain an attitude of independence,” the court wrote in its unanimous decision in 1935.
Without Wilcox and Harris, the five-member NLRB and three-member Merit Systems Protection Board do not have enough members to decide cases, bringing much of the work of the agencies to a standstill.
The NLRB hears cases in which private-sector employers and labor unions are accused of illegal labor practices.
The merit board hears appeals by federal employees when they are fired or otherwise disciplined and has been inundated with new cases as a result of Trump's ongoing purge of the federal workforce.
More than 8,400 appeals have been filed with the board since Trump returned to office in January, which is roughly the number the agency typically receives in two years.
Like several other agencies, both boards were set up by Congress to be independent from the president to maintain impartiality when they decide individual cases.
The D.C. Circuit panel split 2-1 when it paused the lower court rulings last month. Two Republican-appointed judges said removal protections for NLRB and merit board members were likely an invalid encroachment on Trump's powers to manage the executive branch.
But the full court on Monday said those judges had ignored U.S. Supreme Court precedent that upheld the structure of other independent federal agencies.