The Supreme Court greenlit President Donald Trump’s effort Wednesday to fire three Democratic members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).
The Trump administration asked the justices in early July to halt an order reinstating the officials, arguing the judge disregarded the Supreme Court’s earlier decision allowing the president to dismiss officials at other agencies.
“Although our interim orders are not conclusive as to the merits, they inform how a court should exercise its equitable discretion in like cases,” the court’s order states. “The stay we issued in Wilcox reflected ‘our judgment that the Government faces greater risk of harm from an order allowing a removed officer to continue exercising the executive power than a wrongfully removed officer faces from being unable to perform her statutory duty.” (RELATED: Trump Admin Urges SCOTUS To End ‘Chaos’ Caused By Judges Reinstating Fired Executive Officials)
“The same is true on the facts presented here, where the Consumer Product Safety Commission exercises executive power in a similar manner as the National Labor Relations Board, and the case does not otherwise differ from Wilcox in any pertinent respect,” the order continues.
The Trump administration has argued that removal protections preventing the president from firing officials at independent agencies without cause are unconstitutional.
In May, the Supreme Court granted Trump’s similar request to fire members of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB).
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a concurrence Wednesday that the court should have used this opportunity to take up the question on its merits, rather than leave the lower courts in confusion.
“When an emergency application turns on whether this Court will narrow or overrule a precedent, and there is at least a fair prospect (not certainty, but at least some reasonable prospect) that we will do so, the better practice often may be to both grant a stay and grant certiorari before judgment,” he wrote.
Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
“The majority has acted on the emergency docket—with ‘little time, scant briefing, and no argument’—to override Congress’s decisions about how to structure administrative agencies so that they can perform their prescribed duties,” Kagan wrote. “By means of such actions, this Court may facilitate the permanent transfer of authority, piece by piece by piece, from one branch of Government to another.”
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