The Supreme Court has cleared President Trump to fire three Biden appointees on the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
The court granted the Trump administration's request on an emergency basis, allowing Trump to move ahead with removing the three Democrats on the agency, who have pushed their own agenda against Trump's wishes.
The Supreme Court's liberals, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented.
The Trump administration has decried what it calls a judicial assault on the president's powers, which includes the authority to hire and fire executive branch employees as the president sees fit.
The Supreme Court has been generally sympathetic to the White House's view on executive branch control of independent agencies, previously ruling in Trump v. Wilcox that Trump could fire members of the National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board "without cause."
In its brief, unsigned opinion on the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Supreme Court quoted its opinion in Trump v. Wilcox. In that case, the justices held that the wrongful removal of a federal officer is less concerning than "allowing a removed officer to continue exercising the executive power."
The Supreme Court agreed with the Trump administration's argument that Trump v. Wilcox "squarely controls" the dispute with the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which, the court said, "exercises executive power in a similar manner as the National Labor Relations Board."
A Biden-appointed district judge in June had ordered Trump to reinstate three Democrats on the Consumer Product Safety Commission after Trump fired them. The commission has five members who serve staggered terms.
The district court's order put the agency under the control of a Democratic majority, which then "immediately moved to undo actions that the Commission had taken since their removal," the Trump administration noted in its early July appeal.
"That plain-as-day affront to the President’s fundamental Article II powers warrants intervention now just as much as in Wilcox," Solicitor General John D. Sauer wrote.
The Trump administration's battles with the federal bureaucracy could be building toward a major Supreme Court ruling on the scope of executive power.
A 90-year-old Supreme Court precedent, Humphrey's Executor, backstops the independence of federal agencies with "quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial" functions.
But the White House argues, and the Supreme Court seems to tentatively agree, that Humphrey's has allowed agencies like the Consumer Product Safety Commission to arrogate executive power in a way that threatens the Constitution.
In a dissent from the court's ruling, the liberal wing fretted that the justices have "all but overturned" Humphrey’s Executor.
"By allowing the president to remove commissioners for no reason other than their party affiliation, the majority has negated Congress’s choice of agency bipartisanship and independence,” they wrote.
