Supreme Court justices might not have much of a vacation this year. Though they issued the term’s final decisions in argued cases last week, they still have decisions to make on pending emergency applications, and new applications keep rolling in.
The latest one comes in President Donald Trump’s ongoing quest to expand his authority to fire members of federal agencies, this time regarding the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
The high court’s Republican-appointed majority broadly boosted that authority in May, with an order that let Trump fire members of independent labor agencies pending further litigation in that case. Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent for the Democratic appointees criticized the majority for not only ignoring a 90-year-old precedent called Humphrey’s Executor that had protected independent agencies, but doing so in response to an emergency application “with little time, scant briefing, and no argument.”
In the new application Wednesday, U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer cited that case from May, called Trump v. Wilcox, which he said “squarely controls this case” in the administration’s favor. Sauer asked the justices to not only lift a district court order that favored the CPSC members, but he suggested the high court immediately take up full review of the appeal, hold a hearing in the fall “and put a speedy end to the disruption being caused by uncertainty about the scope of Humphrey’s Executor.”
Quickly filing a response Wednesday, the safety commission members urged the high court to refrain from even temporarily halting the lower court order, noting that doing so “would disrupt the status quo.” Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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