President Trump scored another win at the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday after the high court temporarily agreed he can fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
The justices granted a request by the administration to place a stay on an injunction issued by Biden-appointed D.C. District Judge Loren AliKhan. That ruling attempted to bar Trump from using his executive authority to remove FTC member Rebecca Slaughter, a Democrat, from her post.
Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson would have denied the government’s request to pause the injunction.
As is typical with decisions on its emergency (or “interim”) docket, the court did not provide a reasoning for the decision. It did, however, reveal that it has agreed to take up the merits of the case and is poised to hear oral arguments in December.
According to the order, the parties are instructed to answer whether “the statutory removal protections for members of the Federal Trade Commission violate the separation of powers and, if so, whether [Humphrey’s Executor v. United States] … should be overruled,” and if “a federal court may prevent a person’s removal from public office, either through relief at equity or at law.”
The court’s stay will expire once the justices hand down a judgment in the case.
Writing for the dissent, Kagan whined about the majority regularly granting the Trump administration’s emergency requests for stay in cases brought about by leftist-backed lawfare. The Obama appointee complained that, as a result of the majority’s decisions, it “has handed full control of [certain] agencies to the President.”
“He may now remove—so says the majority, though Congress said differently—any member he wishes, for any reason or no reason at all. And he may thereby extinguish the agencies’ bipartisanship and independence,” Kagan wrote. “Our emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars. Still more, it should not be used, as it also has been, to transfer government authority from Congress to the President, and thus to reshape the Nation’s separation of powers.”
Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh recently explained why the Supreme Court must be wary about offering extended legal opinions for cases on the emergency docket in order to avoid creating a “lock-in effect” that may not “reflect the final view” of the court in its final decision on the matter. Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett also addressed the use of the interim docket in her recently released book, noting how the justices are only reacting to matters brought before them and “can only resolve disputes that litigants choose to bring; [they] can’t volunteer answers to questions that no one has asked.”
“As long as litigants continue filing emergency applications, the Court must continue deciding them,” Barrett wrote.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
