Washington – A federal judge in Washington ruled Thursday that President Trump’s firing of a National Labor Relations Board member was unlawful and that she should be allowed to continue in her position.
In a 36-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell of the United States District Court in Washington stated that the Constitution and previous decisions make it clear that Congress has the authority to limit the president’s removal power.
She ruled that the president’s removal of Gwynne Wilcox from the NLRB violated federal law, which states that a board member can be removed only for “neglect of duty or malfeasance in office,” and declared her dismissal void.
“Under our constitutional system, such checks, by design, guard against executive overreach and the risk such overreach would pose of autocracy,” Howell wrote in the decision’s 36 pages. “An American president is not a king — not even a ‘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, appointed by former President Barack Obama, wrote that Mr. Trump “seems intent on pushing the bounds of his office and exercising his power in a manner that violates clear statutory law to test how much the courts will accept the notion of a supreme presidency.”
Former President Joe Biden nominated Wilcox to the NLRB, and the Senate confirmed him for a five-year term beginning in September 2023. She was appointed chair of the board in December 2024.
However, shortly after returning to the White House for a second term, President Trump replaced Wilcox as chair and fired her from her position on the board in late January.
While the National Labor Relations Act requires the president to remove a member “upon notice and hearing, for neglect of duty or malfeasance in office,” the president’s email to Wilcox stated that she and another board member had not “been operating in a manner consistent with the objectives of my administration.”
Wilcox told CBS News last month that she was “stunned” to receive a letter from the White House dismissing her.
“I handled cases where workers were fired and retaliated against for their conduct, but I never imagined that I would be the person being fired for doing my job,” Wilcox, 71, told reporters. She filed a federal lawsuit shortly after being fired.
In her decision, the judge stated that in the 90 years since the NLRB’s inception, the president has never removed a member of its 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,” she clarified.
The court determined that a Supreme Court decision from 1935 governs the outcome of Wilcox’s case. That case created an exception to the president’s authority to remove executive officers.
The Supreme Court ruled that Congress could impose for-cause removal protections for multi-member expert commissions that are partisan balanced and do not exercise executive power.
“The 150-year history and tradition of multimember boards or commissions and 90-year precedent from the Supreme Court approving of removal protections for their officers dictates the same outcome for the NLRB here,” claimed Howell.
According to her, “nothing in the Constitution or the historical development of the removal power has suggested the president’s removal power is absolute.”
“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,” the ruling stated.
Howell chastised Mr. Trump for portraying himself as a king, citing a social media post from the White House last month that featured an illustration of the president wearing a crown with the headline “long live the king” — and claimed that he misunderstands the role of Article II of the Constitution, which defines the president’s authority.
“At issue in this case, is the president’s insistence that he has authority to fire whomever he wants within the Executive branch, overriding any congressionally mandated law in his way,” the author wrote.
“Fortunately, the Framers anticipated such a power grab and gave Article III, not Article II, the authority to interpret the law, including resolving conflicts over congressional checks on presidential authority. The president’s interpretation of the scope of his constitutional power — or, more accurately, aspiration — is completely incorrect.”
Howell’s decision puts the case on a path to the Supreme Court, where it could overturn the 1935 decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. Sarah Harris, acting solicitor general, stated in a letter to Congress last month that the Trump administration believes certain for-cause removal restrictions for multi-member commissions are unconstitutional and would like the Supreme Court to overturn its precedent.
The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, has recently eroded that 90-year-old decision and reasserted the president’s authority to remove executive branch officers at will.
Most notably, in 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s structure of a single leader who could be removed only for inefficiency, neglect, or malfeasance was unconstitutional.
Two justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, have already stated that the Supreme Court should overturn Humphrey’s Executor.
“The decision in Humphrey’s Executor poses a direct threat to our constitutional structure and, as a result, the liberty of the American people,” Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion to the court’s 2020 CFPB decision, which Gorsuch joined.
Thomas, the court’s longest-serving member, stated that in a future case, he “would repudiate what is left of this erroneous precedent.”