The Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration for the second day in a row in emergency litigation, this time in a case involving federal worker firings, following Monday night’s 5-4 ruling in a deportations case.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from Tuesday’s grant of the Trump administration’s application in this latest case. The administration had filed an urgent appeal seeking an immediate halt to a California judge’s order to reinstate roughly 16,000 fired federal employees.
“The District Court’s injunction was based solely on the allegations of the nine non-profit-organization plaintiffs in this case. But under established law, those allegations are presently insufficient to support the organizations’ standing,” the Supreme Court majority said Tuesday in an unsigned order, adding that the order “does not address the claims of the other plaintiffs, which did not form the basis of the District Court’s preliminary injunction.”
The order noted Sotomayor’s vote for denial without explanation and said Jackson would’ve declined to reach the standing question in this emergency context, “where the issue is pending in the lower courts and the applicants have not demonstrated urgency in the form of interim irreparable harm.”
Sotomayor and Jackson also dissented from Monday’s immigration-related decision granting relief for the administration, as did Justice Elena Kagan and Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett.
The high court also sided 5-4 with the administration on Friday in a case about canceling education-related grants.
The federal government’s application in this employment case was one of several complaints to the high court in the early days of President Donald Trump’s second term about lower courts ruling against the administration.
“In the two months since Inauguration Day, district courts have issued more than 40 injunctions or TROs against the Executive Branch,” the administration said in the March 24 court filing, calling the status quo “unsustainable” and writing that lower court judges are “[e]mboldened by the lack of prompt appellate review” and that “[o]nly this Court can end the interbranch power grab.”
It urged the justices to “stop the ongoing assault on the constitutional structure before further damage is wrought.”
Opposing emergency relief, the American Federation of Government Employees, the AFL-CIO and other groups said the district court had correctly found that the federal Office of Personnel Management “directed the firing of tens of thousands of federal employees beginning in early February, on the false pretense that the employees’ performance was deficient.”
The opposition filing said the federal government “illegally fired tens of thousands of public servants, significantly degrading crucial services” and that reinstatement is “a routine remedy in the face of illegal termination.”
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.
