Seth Lucas writes for the Daily Signal about a significant U.S. Supreme Court victory for the Trump administration.
As Americans began to prepare for Memorial Day weekend, the Supreme Court quietly handed President Donald Trump a significant victory in the fight to rein in the rogue D.C. bureaucracy.
In a short, two-page order, the court stayed a district court order that directed Trump to reinstate two federal officials whom he had fired.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett voted for the stay. Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
The obvious effect is that the two officials—Gwynne Wilcox and Cathy Harris, whom Trump removed from the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board, respectively—cannot retake their positions in either agency unless they win their lawsuits.
The implications, however, are far more sweeping.
From its inception during the Progressive era, the administrative state was designed to give technical specialists broad policymaking power and even broader discretion to use that power. Progressives, such as President Woodrow Wilson, believed that important matters of state should not be left to the political process, but should instead be decided by subject matter experts who should be insulated from removal by those who appointed them and unaccountable to the people who elected those who appointed them.
The result was that unelected federal bureaucrats would enjoy the ability not only to control national policy in a whole host of areas but to do what they want regardless of who controls Congress or occupies the White House.
Of course, Progressives conceded when casting the vision for this form of administrative governance that bureaucrats should and often would consider the views of the American people, Congress, and the president as expressed through legislation, directives, and votes. But bureaucrats would retain the discretion to act contrary to those views when they think it in the best interest of the country to do so.
