A federal judge ruled that President Trump’s firing of Gwynne Wilcox was unlawful and ordered her restored to the National Labor Relations Board in an opinion that excoriated his quest to craft a new, super-powerful presidency.
“A President who touts an image of himself as a ‘king’ or a ‘dictator,’ perhaps as his vision of effective leadership, fundamentally misapprehends the role under Article II of the U.S. Constitution,” U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell of Washington D.C. wrote Thursday.
Her opinion mirrored the hearing she held Wednesday, when she delved into the history of the NLRB and unspooled the development of the unitary executive theory, a maximal version of which would imbue Trump with direct control over everyone in the executive branch.
During the hearing, she acknowledged that she is a mere “speed bump” on the way to the Supreme Court. The Trump administration is unabashed that Wilcox’s firing was illegal under current law, but it considers that law unconstitutional and is openly aiming to reach the Supreme Court and convince it to overturn its own precedent.
“The President seems intent on pushing the bounds of his office and exercising his power in a manner violative of clear statutory law to test how much the courts will accept the notion of a presidency that is supreme,” she wrote.
She ordered that Wilcox be permitted to carry out her duties “as a rightful, presidentially-appointed, Senate-confirmed member of the Board,” adding that a President has never removed a member of the NLRB in the 90 years since it was created by Congress.
The case is running parallel to a similar one stemming from the firing of a member of the Merit Systems Protection Board. A different federal judge restored that member to the board earlier this week. Both cases are on track to reach the Supreme Court, where the Trump administration will test its bet that the conservative supermajority is ready to nullify the congressionally granted removal protections for these kinds of agencies. They’re one of the last bastons of independence in the executive branch, as the Roberts Court has steadily eroded agency protections. As Howell pointed out Wednesday, that last bastion includes the Federal Reserve, harbinging global economic instability if it were made vulnerable to a Trump takeover.
“The courts are now again forced to determine how much encroachment on the legislature our Constitution can bear and face a slippery slope toward endorsing a presidency that is untouchable by the law,” Howell wrote. “The President has given no sufficient reason to accept that path here.”
Read the opinion here:
