Editors at National Review Online ponder a recent legal loss for a federal agency.

In Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy earlier this year, the Supreme Court ruled that the constitutional guarantee of the right to trial by jury still counts in administrative cases. Earlier in that case, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals also ruled that the way in which SEC administrative-law judges (ALJs) are appointed and protected from removal violates Article II of the Constitution, which vests executive power in the president.

The SEC is hardly the only federal agency with a similar structure. The National Labor Relations Board is another one. It, too, can initiate enforcement actions internally that deny defendants a trial by jury and instead put them before an ALJ who works for the agency.

Mark Pittman is a district-court judge for the Northern District of Texas, which appeals to the Fifth Circuit. He granted a preliminary injunction to halt an NLRB case for the exact same reasons the SEC’s process was ruled unconstitutional by the Fifth Circuit in Jarkesy. In doing so, he was straightforwardly upholding precedent.

Yet he has been denounced as a “Trump judge” who is working to help evil, greedy corporations stomp on workers’ rights.

First, let’s look at Pittman’s decision. The company Findhelp was accused of violating labor law by its employees’ union, the Office and Professional Employees International Union. The NLRB began its internal ALJ process that resembles the SEC process that the Fifth Circuit ruled unconstitutional. So Findhelp requested a preliminary injunction to stop the proceedings.

“In this case, the NLRB ALJs are afforded the same two layers of for-cause removal protections that the Fifth Circuit found to be unconstitutional with regard to the SEC ALJs,” Pittman wrote. “In fact, the NLRB has not, and cannot, offer any distinction between the relevant provisions or the protections they confer upon the ALJs.”

The NLRB believes Jarkesy was wrongly decided. But Pittman is a district-court judge, bound by Fifth Circuit precedent. If it was unconstitutional for the SEC to have in-house courts with judges protected from removal, it is also unconstitutional for the NLRB to do the same thing.