A federal judge unloaded on President Trump in a ruling Thursday calling his firing of a member of the National Labor Relations Board a “power grab,” “flat wrong” and “a blatant violation of the law.”
Judge Beryl A. Howell said Supreme Court precedent and federal law are clear on protecting members of the National Labor Relations Board from being fired by a president except in cases of good cause.
There was no such reason to fire Gwynne A. Wilcox, a Biden appointee confirmed by the Senate in 2023 to a five-year term and named chair in December, the judge ruled. All Mr. Trump had were “political motivations,” which the judge said wasn’t good enough.
“The president’s interpretation of the scope of his constitutional power — or, more aptly, his aspiration — is flat wrong,” wrote the judge, an Obama appointee to the federal district court in Washington. “The president does not have the authority to terminate members of the National Labor Relations Board at will, and his attempt to fire plaintiff from her position on the board was a blatant violation of the law.”
The Justice Department quickly filed a notice that it was appealing the decision.
The ruling is one of several high-profile legal battles over Mr. Trump’s firing powers.
A federal court has also blocked him from firing a member of the Merit Systems Protection Board, which handles federal employees’ challenges to adverse personnel actions.
But a federal appeals court this week allowed Mr. Trump to move ahead with firing the U.S. special counsel.
At issue is what’s known as independent agencies.
Those are bodies set up by Congress to be someone separate from a president’s total control. In the case of the NLRB, it means the five members are divided between the parties. Congress included the for-cause requirement before any firing.
The fired officials have argued that if they can be ousted at the will of a president, they lose their independence.
Mr. Trump’s team, though, argues the bodies are performing executive functions and so must be responsive to the president’s wishes.
Judge Howell said the case was relatively easy because of a 90-year-old Supreme Court case, known as Humphrey’s Executor. In that ruling, the high court upheld Congress’s ability to insulate independent agency officials from being fired at will.
Mr. Trump’s backers say that precedent needs to be overturned, and they speculate there may be a majority of the Supreme Court ready to do it.
For now, though, Judge Howell left little doubt how she saw Mr. Trump’s attempt.
“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,” she said.
She added: “Luckily, the framers, anticipating such a power grab, vested in Article III, not Article
II, the power to interpret the law, including resolving conflicts about congressional checks on
presidential authority.”
