Washington — The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court on Wednesday to halt lower court decisions that voided President Trump’s firings of a member of the National Labor Relations Board and a member of the Merit Systems Protection Board while a legal challenge to the removals plays out.
In a request for emergency relief from the high court, Solicitor General D. John Sauer said the district court orders reinstating Cathy Harris to her role on the Merit Systems Protection Board and Gwynne Wilcox to the National Labor Relations Board harm the president and the separation of powers.
Sauer asked the high court to issue a stay of district court decisions that found the removals unlawful and said the justices could also take up the case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rules.
“The president should not be forced to delegate his executive power to agency heads who are demonstrably at odds with the administration’s policy objectives for a single day — much less for the months that it would likely take for the courts to resolve this litigation,” he wrote.
The bid for the Supreme Court’s intervention comes as the justices have been faced with a flurry of requests for emergency relief from the Trump administration. More than 150 cases challenging Mr. Trump’s second-term agenda have been filed in courts across the country and are progressing through the federal judiciary.