The Supreme Court just handed Donald Trump one of the biggest expansions of presidential power in decades. It took a federal appeals court all of a few days to act as if the ruling didn't exist.
On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled six to three that Congress cannot shield members of independent agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission from presidential removal, except for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." The justices said that violates the separation of powers baked into the Constitution.
As SCOTUSblog noted, the decision “was a major victory for proponents of the ‘unitary executive’ theory – the idea that the president should have complete control over the executive branch. Under this theory, the president should be able to fire any member of the executive branch, and laws – like the one that the court struck down – that restrict his ability to do so violate the separation of powers.”
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, wrote that "the President must have the assistance of officers he can trust. Although it is up to the Senate to decide whether to confirm those with whom the President would prefer to work, neither Congress nor the courts may saddle him with those with whom he cannot work. Subordinates who exercise the President's power are subject to removal by him. Then, and only then, can they remain accountable to the President, and the President to the people."
Straightforward enough. Apparently not for the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. Just days after that decision came down, it ruled two to one against the Trump administration in a case involving 19 intelligence officers who were fired for their work on DEI programs. The court said the firings were illegal because the officers weren't given the right to appeal their terminations or the chance to request reassignment first.
But the court found that government regulations provided an opportunity for intelligence officers to seek reassignment.
None of the fired officers were initially hired as diversity or human resources experts. They were instead intelligence specialists who were assigned to diversity offices during the Biden administration, when the C.I.A. director and the director of national intelligence were seeking to diversify agencies that had long been mostly white.
The appeals court affirmed a lower court’s ruling that the officers’ Fifth Amendment right to due process had been violated.
The judges said that "workplace misconduct" or "performance concerns" should have justified the firings, not a president's policy priorities. Since when does a president need a permission slip to decide who works for him? Whatever happened to the idea of serving at the pleasure of the president?
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That reasoning runs headfirst into Trump v. Slaughter, the very ruling the Supreme Court issued days earlier, establishing that the president has full authority to remove heads of independent agencies at his discretion. Maybe the Slaughter decision was narrow in scope, but its message was not: the president has broad leeway in who works in his own executive branch.
The Fourth Circuit either missed the memo or didn’t care.
The administration hasn't said whether it plans to appeal, but it should and likely will. It’s as if Trump is the first president in history to be told he can’t run the executive branch. If this ruling stands, it tells every federal bureaucrat that the courts will run interference for him or her, no matter what the nation's highest court says. That's not how any of this is supposed to work.
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