The court appears to be ready to give the president extraordinary power over what was an independent worker and consumer protection agency.
The west facade of the Supreme Court building in Washington, DC at dusk.
(Joe Ravi/cc-by-sa 3.0)
This is a nasty news alert for all people who care about workers and consumers who are protected from illegal, exploitative and dangerous business practices. The Supreme Court appears to be ready to give President Donald Trump extraordinary power over what has been segregated by independent experts and consumer protection agencies that have been isolated from White House interference for almost a century.
The court showed his hand Wilcox v. Trump– Incidents involving Trump’s unprecedented efforts to fire Gwyn Wilcox – A confirmed member in the National Labor Relations Committee (NLRB) Senate and the first black woman to serve as a member of the NLRB.
Members of independent bodies such as the NLRB, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) are nominated by the President and confirmed by the US Senate on defined terms. They are protected by law against being excluded from their duties, except in cases where there is fraud and only after notification and hearing. The Supreme Court has been recognising and respecting removal protections for these “causes” for 90 years.
That’s up to now. Trump has determined that when he takes office in a second term, he has the power to unilaterally eliminate independent boards and commission members at any time for some reason. The list of victims is long. In addition to Wilcox, he has fired members of the Equality of Employment Opportunity Commission, FTC, CPSC, Merit System Protection Commission and the Federal Bureau of Labor Relations. And by firing these officials, Trump left these consumer and workers’ protection agencies without a quorum to hold businesses accountable.
Wilcox’s case has been passed through the court as it challenges an attempt to remove her from the president’s office. Wilcox I won At the district court level, the Trump administration has been fighting ever since to maintain that decision while trying to overturn it. And the Supreme Court has just recognised the Trump administration’s wishes. order Allowing a district court decision to stay means that you are out of work unless Wilcox receives a brief on the merits of the case and hears the arguments, and after the Supreme Court issues a decision that it was accidentally deleted, and unless the Supreme Court exists.
Current Issues
Unfortunately, the court’s opinion that allowed the stay predicts a climb uphill Wilcox, which won the merit. A majority of the courts appear to bias the merits of the case by saying that the Trump administration is likely to win over the issue of presidential authority firing members of the NLRB. Joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Judge Elena Kagan has raised fierce dissent, noting that the majority have dismissed decades of case law by issuing stays and “blessed” Trump’s actions, despite clearly illegal under existing Supreme Court precedents.
The court’s orders are attempting to disengage a president who already wants to push or violate the boundaries of his power. Now that the Supreme Court nodded to the power to fire independent committees and members of committees, he will definitely continue.
If you are Amazon or Tesla or Meta or Starbucks or REI or Trader Joes and you are investigating or prosecuting you for allegedly breaking the Workers or Consumer Protection Act, the Supreme Court has given you to take a new path to bringing charges to you. (Yes, all these companies currently have pending cases before one or more independent agencies.) Or, the companies can ask the White House to have one of their enemies investigated as the FTC is reportedly going on an issue with the X enemy media in Elon Musk.
The potential calm effect on responsible and impartial enforcement of our Workers and Consumer Protection Act is clear. And when this removal power is combined with the president’s removal power Recent Presidential Orders With the aim of trying to control the actions of independent institutions and interpretations of law, we became aware and rely on them, and were able to witness the end of independent experts.
The outcome is bad for workers, bad for consumers, bad for responsible, law-abiding businesses, covered in a controlled, politically driven law enforcement system that the White House is. Workers and consumer advocates, responsible businesses, members of Congress (their powers are taken away by the President), the state attorney general, and others who believe in and rely on the value of experts who need to enforce the law fairly should enforce the value of experts who need to persuade the Supreme Court of the errors and dangers of those errors. Maybe, just maybe, the court will make it right when it determines the merits of the case in the next period.
