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WASHINGTON (CN) — A federal judge ordered National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox reinstated to her position Thursday after President Donald Trump tried to terminate her without just cause.
Wilcox was one of several high-profile officials Trump terminated in the early days of his new administration via two-sentence emails that provided no justification for their removal.
U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell slammed Wilcox’s termination in a 36-page opinion and said Trump was using his executive power to an extent rarely seen in the United States history, and running roughshod over the Constitution.
“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,” the Barack Obama appointee wrote.
Howell noted in a footnote that she was drawing from Trump and the White House’s own statements, including a Feb. 19 White House post on X sharing a faked Time magazine cover with the words “Long Live the King” below a photo of Trump wearing a crown, and Trump’s campaign promise that he’d be a dictator on day one.
She said that while the Constitution does not provide explicit guidelines for the president’s power to remove Wilcox, that silence does not give Trump the authority to “willy-nilly” override a congressional judgment that federal officers need to be independent from direct presidential control.
She rejected Trump’s insistence that he could fire any federal agency employee as head of the executive branch, noting that the founding fathers vested the authority to interpret the law to the courts, not the president.
“The president’s interpretation of the scope of his constitutional power — or, more aptly, his aspiration — is flat wrong,” Howell said.
Wilcox’s removal drew stark criticism, as she was the first Black woman to serve on the labor board and the first to serve as its chair. The two other members are Joe Biden appointee David Prouty and Trump appointee Marvin Kaplan, whom Trump named the new chair on Jan. 21.
She was the first NLRB member to be removed by a president since the body’s creation in 1935.
Trump argued the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States, which granted the president at least the presumption of immunity from criminal prosecution, applied to his removal power and should be read that the president is not subject to criminal or civil legislative constraints. Howell rejected that argument.
“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 said. “The president has given no sufficient reason to accept that path here.”
Howell’s ruling follows a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals decision Wednesday night that Hampton Dellinger, head of the Office of Special Counsel, can be removed from office after lifting U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson’s temporary order preventing his removal.
The three-judge panel has yet to issue its opinion explaining the decision, but indicated in a two-page order that the government had adequately shown a stay in the case pending the final appellate decision was warranted.
The decision, by U.S. Circuit Judges Karen Henderson, Patricia Millett and Justin Walker, a George H.W. Bush, Obama and Trump appointee, respectively, upended what was a growing trend among federal judges in Washington.
This week, U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras ruled that Trump’s sudden termination of Merit Systems Protection Board chair Cathy Harris was illegal.
Contreras, also an Obama appointee, determined that the president could not terminate agency heads at a whim without just cause, which Congress specifically defined as inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office under the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989.
The Justice Department on Thursday requested an emergency stay in its ongoing appeal of Contreras’ decision, potentially setting up a similar reversal. An appellate panel has yet to be assigned in that case.
Each case, all expected to ultimately reach the Supreme Court once, could present an opportunity for the high court to either overturn or strengthen the landmark 1935 case Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which has long limited the president’s ability to remove independent agency heads.
Howell cited Humphrey’s Executor in her decision, noting that the case reinforced long-standing removal protections for members of independent agencies and reflected the balance of power between political branches.
“Defendant’s hyperbolic characterization that legislative and judicial checks on executive authority, as invoked by plaintiff, present ‘extraordinary intrusions on the executive branch,’ is both incorrect and troubling,” Howell said. “An American president is not a king — not even an ‘elected’ one — and his power to remove federal officers and honest civil servants like plaintiff is not absolute.”
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