Judge blasts Trump’s firing of National Labor Relations Board member, orders reinstatement

A federal judge Thursday ordered the reinstatement of a National Labor Relations Board member and had harsh words for President Donald Trump in the process.

Senior Judge Beryl Howell of the district court in Washington, D.C., said Trump lacks the power to freely fire members of the NLRB, in this case Gwynne Wilcox, the first Black woman to serve on the board.

“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,” Howell wrote.

The NLRB polices unfair labor practices and mediates worker-management disputes. Wilcox was confirmed by the Senate in 2023 for a second five-year term.

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Central to Wilcox’s case, the judge wrote, “is the President’s insistence that he has authority to fire whomever he wants within the Executive branch, overriding any congressionally mandated law in his way.”

Trump does not have that power, Howell contended, writing that Trump’s “interpretation of the scope of his constitutional power—or, more aptly, his aspiration—is flat wrong.”

Howell says the framers of the Constitution, “anticipating such a power grab,” gave the courts “the power to interpret the law, including resolving conflicts about congressional checks on presidential authority.”

“An American President is not a king—not even an ‘elected’ one—and his power to remove federal officers and honest civil servants like plaintiff is not absolute, but may be constrained in appropriate circumstances, as are present here,” Howell 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 U.S. Constitution,” she added.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the judge’s ruling.

Deepak Gupta, an attorney for Wilcox, celebrated the ruling in a post on X.

“We won! The U.S. District Court just ruled that President Trump unlawfully removed Gwynne Wilcox as a member of the National Labor Relations Board,” he wrote.