Gwynne Wilcox, attorney who was a member and chairman of the National Labor Relations Board.
Courtesy: National Labor Relations Board
A federal judge on Thursday reversed the firing of a National Labor Relations Board member by President Donald Trump, with a scathing ruling that said “an American president is not a king.”
The ordered reinstating former NLRB chair Gwynne Wilcox came a month after she sued to be returned to the board.
“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,” Judge Beryl Howell wrote in the order Thursday in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.
Howell’s ruling is almost certain to be appealed by the Trump administration.
The NLRB, which was created by Congress, is responsible for enforcing U.S. labor laws.
Wilcox, who was he first Black woman ever on the board, was also the first NLRB member ever to be fired by a president in the agency’s 90-year history.
Trump replaced her as chair with another board member on his first day back in the White House on Jan. 20, and a week later fired her and the NLRB’s top lawyer, Jennifer Abruzzo, in a late-night email.
That email said that Wilcox — who was an appointee of former President Joe Biden — was being terminated because “heads of agencies within the Executive Branch must share the objectives of [Trump’s] administration.”
But Howell in her ruling Thursday said Trump’s “interpretation of the scope of his constitutional power — or, more aptly, his aspiration — is flat wrong.”
“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, but may be constrained in appropriate circumstances, as are present here,” Howell wrote.
“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.” Article II is the section of the Constitution detailing the executive power of the presidency.
Howell’s ruling could end up being challenged by the Trump administration all the way to the Supreme Court.
Wilcox’s attorney Deepak Gupta, in a statement said, “This decisive victory firmly rejects an extreme presidential power grab.”
“Today’s decision is a win not only for Ms. Wilcox but also for the integrity of the National Labor Relations Board and its vital mission to protect American workers,” Gupta said in a statement. “The court has reinforced key legal protections for independent agencies that Congress designed to be impartial.”
The White House had no immediate comment on the ruling.
The ruling came hours after a top federal ethics watchdog, Office of Special Counsel chief Hampton Dellinger, said that he was dropping a legal battle to reverse his firing by Trump.
Another federal district court judge in Washington, D.C., on Saturday had ruled that Trump’s termination of Dellinger was illegal.
But a three-judge panel on the federal appeals court in D.C. on Wednesday said that Dellinger could be removed from his post pending the outcome of an appeal by the Department of Justice challenging the lower court ruling.
Dellinger in a statement Thursday announcing he would no longer pursue the case, said, “This new [appeals court] ruling means that OSC will be run by someone totally beholden to the President for the months that would pass before I could get a final decision from the U.S. Supreme Court.”
