Court rules Trump’s firing of labor board official illegal, saying president is not a king

Old_Joe

Following are excerpts from a current report in The Guardian:

Judge orders reinstatement of Gwynne Wilcox to National Labor Relations Board after her removal by US president

A federal court ruled that Donald Trump’s abrupt firing of a former senior official at the top US labor watchdog was illegal, and ordered that she be reinstated.

Gwynne Wilcox was the first member of the National Labor Relations Board to be removed by a US president since the board’s inception in 1935.

The framers of the US constitution “made clear that no one in our system of government was meant to be king – the President included – and not just in name only”, the judge Beryl A Howell, wrote in the ruling.

Howell presided over the hearing held on Wednesday on a motion for summary judgment in the District of Columbia. “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,” she wrote.

“A president who touts an image of himself as a ‘king’ or a ‘dictator,’ perhaps as his vision of effective leadership, fundamentally misapprehends the role under Article II of the US Constitution,” wrote Howell.

Article II of the US Constitution outlines the executive powers and responsibilities of the president. Howell continued, “in our constitutional order, the president is tasked to be a conscientious custodian of the law, albeit an energetic one, to take care of effectuating his enumerated duties, including the laws enacted by the Congress and as interpreted by the Judiciary”.