The U.S. Supreme Court has sided with President Donald Trump and said he has the legal right to fire federal employees working for independent agencies.
The SCOTUS ruled 6-3 in favor of the Trump administration, with leftist Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson in dissent.
The case had been brought by two employees of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board who argued that a president could not fire them. But the SCOTUS ruled that Trump could fire such workers without cause.
“Because the Constitution vests the executive power in the President,” the ruling states, “he may remove without cause executive officers who exercise that power on his behalf, subject to narrow exceptions recognized by our precedents …”
The curt did note that this ruling did not make any determinations about whether the two agencies in question might fit in a catagory that would exempt them from the basic ruling. Meaning that a later court case could determine that these two boards in particular are exempt from the power to be fired. The court was simply ruling on the general concept of whether a president could fire workers on independent agencies and boards without cause — which, again, they said he could.
“The stay also reflects 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,” the ruling added.
The administration’s lawyers had argued that the firing was taking place because the two agencies had begun moving far a field of their original purpose for being constituted and taking more power into their own hands than they should.
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