Washington — A federal judge in Washington ruled Thursday that President Trump’s firing of the chair of the National Labor Relations Board was unlawful and said she must be allowed to continue in her role.
In a 36-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, who sits on the U.S. District Court in Washington, said that the Constitution and past cases make clear that Congress can limit the president’s removal power. She ruled that the president’s firing of Gwynne Wilcox from the National Labor Relations Board violated federal law that allows for a board member to be removed only for “neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”
“Under our constitutional system, such checks, by design, guard against executive overreach and the risk such overreach would pose of autocracy,” Howell wrote in a 36-page decision. “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 that Mr. Trump “seems intent on pushing the bounds of his office and exercising his power in a manner violative of clear statutory law to test how much the courts will accept the notion of a presidency that is supreme.”
This is a breaking news story and will be updated.
