NPR - Yesterday, the Supreme Court granted the Trump administration’s emergency request to fire the heads of two independent agencies. The fired individuals are Gwynne Wilcox, a member of the National Labor Relations Board, and Cathy Harris, a member of the Merit Systems Protection Board. The 6-3 ruling is technically temporary, but it indicates how the higher court views the extent of the president’s power.
When creating the bipartisan agencies, Congress wrote into law that their members can only be fired for cause,
like neglect of duty, NPR’s Andrea Hsu says. SCOTUS stated that the
Constitution gives the president the power to fire officials who help
him carry out his duties, with only narrow exceptions. The ruling isn’t
definitive. Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent that it isn’t just
someone’s job at stake, but the very idea that Congress embraced when it
created independent agencies. Wilcox and Harris warned that if the
court found Trump had the power to remove them, nothing would stop him from firing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.
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