Trump asks Supreme Court to let him fire members of independent labor boards

President Donald Trump’s administration filed an emergency appeal at the Supreme Court on Wednesday seeking to dismiss board members at two independent federal labor agencies whom he had tried to fire.

President Donald Trump’s administration filed an emergency appeal at the Supreme Court on Wednesday seeking to dismiss board members at two independent federal labor agencies whom he had tried to fire. “The president should not be forced to delegate his executive power to agency heads who are demonstrably at odds with the administration’s policy objectives for a single day – much less for the months that it would likely take for the courts to resolve this litigation,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the Supreme Court in the filing. The emergency case follows a decision from an appeals court in Washington that temporarily reinstated Gwynne Wilcox, a member of the National Labor Relations Board, and Cathy Harris, chairwoman of the Merit Systems Protection Board. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to block that order and also to hear arguments in the case. The underlying lawsuit raises fundamental questions about the president’s authority to remove officials within the executive branch that Congress said could only be dismissed for cause, such as inefficiency or malfeasance – not because the president disagrees with their decisions. The conservative Supreme Court in recent years has moved toward expanding the president’s power to control independent agencies. “This case raises a constitutional question of profound importance: whether the president can supervise and control agency heads who exercise vast executive power on the president’s behalf, or whether Congress may insulate those agency heads from presidential control by preventing the President from removing them at will,” Sauer wrote.