They did hand Trump one temporary victory. Temporary, because they struck down a temporary injunction from a district court judge blocking him from firing Biden's staffers from his government. (Are you kidding?)
This doesn't resolve the issue, and later, the Supreme Court may wind up forcing Trump to keep Biden's people in "his" government.
But for now, the temporary injunction is overturned.
The U.S. Supreme Court sided with President Donald Trump, allowing him to remove two Biden-appointed officials from key federal boards, affirming executive authority in a major separation-of-powers decision. The ruling sets the stage for a broader challenge to decades-old precedent limiting the president's power over independent agencies.
Key Details:
Trump removed NLRB member Gwynne Wilcox and MSPB member Cathy Harris, sparking legal challenges.
The Supreme Court blocked a lower court's order to reinstate the two Democrat appointees.
Justices hinted at preserving protections for some officials, like Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.
Of course.
The Supreme Court on Thursday delivered a significant win for President Donald Trump, ruling in favor of his authority to remove Biden-appointed officials from independent federal boards. The decision effectively blocks Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and Cathy Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) from returning to their posts after being abruptly terminated by Trump earlier this year.
Both Wilcox and Harris had filed lawsuits in D.C. federal court claiming their terminations were "unlawful." But the Court's ruling--pushed forward by a majority of conservative justices--signals a shift toward reinforcing presidential control over the executive branch.
At the heart of the case is the question of whether presidents can remove officials from so-called independent agencies without cause, a precedent set nearly 90 years ago in Humphrey's Executor v. United States. Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily halted their reinstatement earlier this year, and now the full Court has backed that move.
The Court's decision did not come without dissent. Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the Court's liberal wing, sharply criticized the ruling. "Not since the 1950s (or even before) has a President, without a legitimate reason, tried to remove an officer from a classic independent agency," she wrote.
Still, the justices did suggest that some limits remain intact--hinting that any attempt to remove Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, a frequent Trump target, could be blocked. Powell has faced criticism from Trump for refusing to cut interest rates more aggressively.
The Trump administration's legal team had urged the justices to either keep Wilcox and Harris off the boards while lower courts hear the case or bypass the appeals process entirely--arguing that reinstating them could cause "irreparable harm to the President and to the separation of powers."
"The President would lose control of critical parts of the Executive Branch for a significant portion of his term," Trump's attorneys wrote in their filing, "and he would likely have to spend further months voiding actions taken by improperly reinstated agency leaders."
The Supreme Court served up a more important loss. Oklahoma was poised to allow parents and students to use state money to attend any schools they liked, including religious ones, and Amy Coney Barrett recused herself from hearing the case.
The Court then split 4-4 on the issue. It's a per curiam ("by the court") decision, which means no justice signed it and we don't know who voted which way. We can assume that Roberts joined the liberals (because he is a liberal, so there's nothing to "join").
Which means the lower court's ruling, which had banned the use of state money to pay for religious schools, stands.
American Greatness runs an op-ed celebrating the "demise of the neocon Catholic establishment" as exemplified by the Federalist Society, a group which is basically establishment-liberal but with a couple of caveats. For too long conservatives have relied on this unconservative group to pick our judges and justices for us. Obviously they've delivered some real winners: Roberts. Barrett. Kavanaugh. Gorsuch.
Update: A lowly district court just issued another injunction presuming to overrule the elected president of the United States.