Dive Brief:
- U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell ordered Thursday for Gwynne Wilcox to be reinstated to her position as a member of the National Labor Relations Board, ruling that Wilcox was “unlawfully terminated” by President Donald Trump (Wilcox v. Trump).
- Howell characterized Wilcox’s firing as a “power grab” by the president. “The President’s interpretation of the scope of his constitutional power — or, more aptly, his aspiration — is flat wrong. 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,” she wrote.
- Under the National Labor Relations Act, the president can only remove independent board members in cases of “neglect of duty or malfeasance in office, but for no other cause,” and only after “notice and hearing,” and neither were the case in Wilcox’s termination, Howell said.
Dive Insight:
The ruling reestablishes a three-member quorum on the board, allowing it to once again issue decisions.
Howell’s ruling comes one day after a public hearing in which attorneys argued the constitutionality of a 90-year-old U.S. Supreme Court precedent that reaffirmed Congress’ power to create independent boards and commissions and denied the president the ability to remove members of those agencies at will.
During the hearing, Howell said that the arguments in the District Court were likely “merely a speed bump” for the parties on the case’s route to the Supreme Court.
In the lawsuit, Wilcox said the lawsuit was the “test case” the president likely wanted after his unprecedented firing of congressionally approved members of independent agencies to challenge the 1935 ruling in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States.
“In the ninety years since the NLRB’s founding, the President has never removed a member of the Board. His attempt to do so here is blatantly illegal, and his constitutional arguments to excuse this illegal act are contrary to Supreme Court precedent and over a century of practice,” Howell wrote. “The Framers made clear that no one in our system of government was meant to be king — the President included — and not just in name only.
This is a developing story.
