Washington – The Supreme Court Authorized Wednesday President Donald Trump To fire members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, a federal congress of the agency have been set up to be independent of political pressures.
The judges, granting an emergency request submitted by the Trump administration, blocked the decision of a federal judge based in Maryland who restored Mary Boyle, Alexander Hoehn-Saric and Richard Trumka Jr., who were all appointed by President Joe Biden.
Without the three members, the commission of five members would not currently miss the quorum necessary to fulfill its obligation to protect consumers against defective products.
Under the existing law, members can only be removed for “negligence of duty or embezzlement”, but Trump went forward and still dismissed them, as he did in other agencies with similar restrictions within the framework of his aggressive efforts to reshape the federal government.
The Supreme Court in May I allowed him to draw members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board, throwing aside a precedent dating from 1935 which confirmed the withdrawal protections.
THE Uncommon order On Wednesday, the last case was “checked downright” by what the high court had then decided.
As in the previous case, the three liberal judges of the conservative majority court dissident.
“Once again, this court uses its emergency file to destroy the independence of an independent agency, as the Congress created,” wrote Judge Elena Kagan.
The court ruled in favor of the Trump administration on a wide variety of questions in cases that reach the court in case of an emergency, with decisions taken quickly with few explanations and without in -depth information or oral arguments. More recently, the court on July 14 As much the administration To move forward with mass layoffs to the education department.
By ruling against Trump on the dismissals of the independent agency, the judges of the lower courts relied on the previous one of 1935, a case called executor of Humphrey v. United States, which the Supreme Court did not cancel but reported in due time.
The Court in recent decisions has undermined the precedent of 1935 by affirming that restrictions similar to the presidential power involving other agencies are unconstitutional because they undermine the main constitutional powers of the president.
In 2020, the court ruled on these reasons in a case involving the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Office and followed this with a similar decision a year later concerning the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
Trump in May has moved to dismiss the three members of the Consumer Product Safety Committee. A month later, the judge of the American district court Matthew Maddox ordered that they were reinstated and they returned to their employment while the dispute continued.
The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, refused to suspend the decision of Maddox.
The Commission, set up in 1972 by the Congress, oversees a wide variety of consumer products problems, including safety standards and injury prevention research.
Senator Amy Klobuchar, d-minn., Member of the Commercial, Science and Transport Committee, criticized the decision of the Supreme Court.
“In the running the three Democratic commissioners, the president has undermined the independent structure of the Commission and his critical work – and the Supreme Court allows,” said Klobuchar.
To isolate the policy of politics, the congress gave members of the seven -year -old mandates, stipulated that only three could represent the same political party and declared that the president could not dismiss them at will.
The five members, who are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, should have expertise in the safety problems of consumer products.
The Solicitor General D. John Sauer declared in court documents that Maddox’s decision had “sown chaos and dysfunction” at the agency, the reintegrated members transforming to cancel the actions that the Commission has taken after being initially dismissed.
Kara Rollins, lawyer for the dispute of the non -profit legal group New Civil Liberties Alliance Alliance, which is not directly involved in the case but is engaged in other legal battles against the Commission, said in a statement that the High Court ordinance “puts an end to the Chaos” which followed Maddox’s decision.
Lawyers for the members of the Commission wrote in their own file that the court would add to the disruption if this allowed their customers to be removed from their functions a second time. In some cases, the three commissioners “canceled the actions that the CPSC took illegally” during the work period, added the lawyers.