Latest news with #executivebranch
Fox News
3 days ago
- Business
- Fox News
Trump admin asks SCOTUS to allow it to move forward with plans to slash federal workforce
The Trump administration on Monday asked the Supreme Court to immediately intervene and allow them to proceed with their plans to slash the size of the federal workforce, arguing in an emergency appeal that the lower court's decision had inflicted "ongoing and severe harm" on the executive branch. In the emergency appeal, Trump lawyers told justices that the lower court ruling "interfere with the executive branch's internal operations and unquestioned legal authority to plan and carry out RIFs," or Reductions in Force, "and does so on a government-wide scale." More concretely, the injunction has brought to a halt numerous in-progress RIFs at more than a dozen federal agencies, sowing confusion about what RIF-related steps agencies may take and compelling the government to retain – at taxpayer expense – thousands of employees." The emergency appeal is the 18th emergency appeal that lawyers for the Trump administration have submitted to the Supreme Court since Trump was sworn in to his second White House term. It comes as the administration and federal judges have sparred in court over a number of executive orders and actions from the president, teeing up a high-stakes clash over the powers of the judiciary and the executive branch. This is a breaking news story. Check back for updates.
New York Times
25-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Why Is This Supreme Court Handing Trump More and More Power?
Since taking his second oath of office, President Trump has been on a firing spree. In violation of numerous laws or longstanding presidential practice (or both), he has ordered the removal of many high-level officials who normally retain their positions regardless of who is in the Oval Office. Some of these high-level officials have successfully challenged their removal in the lower courts. But on Thursday, in a case involving members of the National Labor Relations and Merit Systems Protection Boards, the Supreme Court quietly blessed some or all of these firings. In doing so, the court effectively allowed the president to neutralize some of the last remaining sites of independent expertise and authority inside the executive branch. The court sought to cast its intervention as temporary, procedural and grounded in considerations of stability, with the unsigned order noting concerns about the 'disruptive effect of the repeated removal and reinstatement of officers during the pendency of this litigation.' In truth, the decision was radical. Whatever one thinks about the underlying question of presidential authority, the court should not have disposed of the case this way. It effectively overruled an important and nearly century-old precedent central to the structure of the federal government without full briefing or argument. And it did so in a thinly reasoned, unsigned, two-page order handing the president underspecified but considerable new authority. Over the last four months, the legal world — and the country — has been plunged into chaos, and the Supreme Court bears a heavy dose of responsibility. Many of it decisions involving the presidency — including last year's on presidential immunity — have enabled the president to declare himself above the law. The court's latest order both enables the consolidation of additional power in the presidency and risks assimilating a 'move fast and break things' ethos into constitutional law. No modern president has ever come close to the large-scale personnel purges that we have seen under Mr. Trump, and for good reason: Many of the officials in question are protected by law from being fired at will by the president. Mr. Trump maintains that laws limiting the president's ability to fire high-level officials are unconstitutional. In making that argument, he is drawing on a series of recent Supreme Court opinions emphasizing the importance of presidential control over subordinate officials and invalidating removal limitations at agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But those recent decisions exist alongside another, older precedent, which until now has stood as a bulwark against any president's ability to lay waste to independent agencies: the Supreme Court's 1935 opinion in Humphrey's Executor v. United States. In that case, the court concluded that Congress could create expert agencies designed to enjoy a degree of independence from the president and could limit the president's ability to fire at will the leaders of such agencies. The court's recent unitary executive cases, with their expansive vision of presidential control, haven't formally overruled Humphrey's Executor. In fact, they stated explicitly that they were not 'revisit[ing] that case,' which involved an agency, the Federal Trade Commission, whose multi-member structure differed from the single-member leadership structure at issue in the court's recent cases. To be sure, the logic of the recent cases cast considerable doubt on Humphrey's Executor. But lower courts reviewing challenges to President Trump's firings have concluded that those firings are unlawful under existing precedent, applying Humphrey's Executor and leaving to the Supreme Court 'the prerogative of overruling its own decisions.' That's what happened in the challenges brought by Cathy Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board and Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board, two agencies that look a lot like the F.T.C. Ms. Harris and Ms. Wilcox prevailed in their cases before U.S. District Courts and then the full D.C. Circuit. But last week the Supreme Court 'stayed' those lower court rulings protecting Ms. Harris and Ms. Wilcox, and permitted their firings to stand while the litigation proceeded. The court provided scant reasoning for its decision, though it hastened to add that nothing it said should be taken to cast doubt on 'the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors or other members of the Federal Open Market Committee' — a nakedly policy-driven effort to head off the prospect of President Trump making good on threats to fire Jerome Powell, the Fed chair. To be clear, I am not a fan of unitary executive theory, or of its proponents' singular fixation on the president's power to fire — a power the Constitution doesn't expressly give the president and one that I don't think history supports. Even if you disagree — even if you think that Article II's grant of 'the executive power' to the president includes the power to fire at will any high-level official in the executive branch — the court's disposition of the case sends a profoundly dangerous message to the White House. In firing officials like Ms. Harris and Ms. Wilcox, the administration acted in flagrant violation of statutes and in direct defiance of the Supreme Court. Handing the president a win here suggests that the administration did not need to abide by Congress's statutes or the Supreme Court's rulings as it sought to change legal understandings. Given the range of high-stakes legal questions pending before the courts — on questions ranging from the due process rights of migrantsto the termination of federal funds to the firing of civil servants — this decision risks emboldening the administration further to act outside of our traditional constitutional order. And it did so during a week when the administration has accelerated its assault on both norms and law — criminally charging a member of Congress, accepting a luxury Qatari jet and defending the president's lavish investor dinner that would have been unthinkable under the ethics guidelines of previous presidential administrations. In the past four months, the lower courts have done more than other government entities to respond to the chaos emanating from the Trump administration. They have enforced constitutional guarantees, required compliance with statutes and insisted on the force of the decisions of the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, by contrast, has undermined lower courts seeking to protect the rule of law and emboldened an administration eager to trample it. You can see why White House lawyers could feel encouraged to advise Mr. Trump of the correctness of a claim he was once mocked for making: 'I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.' The court may believe that it retains the ultimate authority to check presidential lawlessness, even as it signs off on the elimination of many other constraints on presidential power. The danger is that by the time the court actually tries to exercise that authority, it may be too late.
CNN
21-05-2025
- Politics
- CNN
Vance says Roberts is ‘profoundly wrong' about judiciary's role to check executive branch
Vice President JD Vance called Chief Justice John Roberts' comments earlier this month that the judiciary's role is to check the executive branch a 'profoundly wrong sentiment' and said the courts should be 'deferential' to the president, particularly when it comes to immigration. 'I thought that was a profoundly wrong sentiment. That's one half of his job, the other half of his job is to check the excesses of his own branch. And you cannot have a country where the American people keep on electing immigration enforcement and the courts tell the American people they're not allowed to have what they voted for,' Vance told New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat on the 'Interesting Times' podcast, which was taped on Monday. Vance was responding to Roberts' remarks at an event in Buffalo, New York, where the chief justice stressed the importance of judicial independence. 'The judiciary is a coequal branch of government, separate from the others with the authority to interpret the Constitution as law, and strike down, obviously, acts of Congress or acts of the president,' Roberts said at the event. The judiciary's role, Roberts added, is to 'decide cases but, in the course of that, check the excesses of Congress or of the executive and that does require a degree of independence.' Vance's interview with The Times, which was taped in Rome after he attended the inaugural mass for Pope Leo XIV, also delved into the vice president's Catholic faith and how it shapes his role as a political leader. While Vance said he believes the administration has 'an obligation to treat people humanely,' he also said it's an 'open question' how much due process is 'due' to undocumented immigrants. 'I've obviously expressed public frustration on this, which is yes, illegal immigrants, by virtue of being in the United States, are entitled to some due process,' Vance said. 'But the amount of process that is due and how you enforce those legislative standards and how you actually bring them to bear is, I think, very much an open question.' On Friday, the Supreme Court blocked President Donald Trump from moving forward with deporting a group of immigrants in northern Texas under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act – a win for Venezuelans who feared they were going to be removed under the wartime authority. The administration invoked the powers earlier this year to speed deportations of alleged gang members and has cited national security concerns. Asked about the justification for using those legal authorities to deport people, Vance conceded that 'we don't have 5 million uniform combatants.' But he pointed to thousands of migrants who he said, without evidence, 'intentionally came to the United States to cause violence' to argue that courts need to be deferential to the president on what he called a 'public safety' issue. 'I think that the courts need to be somewhat deferential. In fact, I think the design is that they should be extremely deferential to these questions of political judgment made by the people's elected president of United States,' Vance said. 'People under appreciate the level of public safety stress that we're under when the president talks about how bad crime is.' When asked how he would define success on immigration after Trump's term, Vance also pointed to the courts. 'Success, to me, is not so much a number, though, obviously I'd love to see the gross majority of the illegal immigrants who came in under Biden deported,' Vance said. 'Success, to me, is that we have established a set of rules and principles that the courts are comfortable with and that we have the infrastructure to do that, allows us to deport large numbers of illegal aliens when large numbers of illegal aliens come into the country.' Vance acknowledged he's sometimes had to reconcile his faith with the administration's policy decisions while going on to defend its actions on immigration. 'I understand your point and making these judgments, if you take the teachings of our faith seriously, they are hard. I'm not going to pretend that I haven't struggled with some of this, that I haven't thought about whether, you know, we're doing the precisely right thing,' Vance told Douthat. 'The concern that you raise is fair, there has to be some way in which you're asking yourself as you go about enforcing the law – even, to your point, against a very dangerous people – that you're enforcing the law consistent with, you know, the Catholic Church's moral dictates and so forth.' Douthat interjected, 'And American law and basic principles.' 'Most importantly, American law,' Vance said. Asked about his disagreements on immigration with Popes Francis and Leo, Vance – who said he was wearing a tie Francis gifted him before his death – said that you have to 'hold two ideas in your head at the same time' about enforcing border laws and respecting the dignity of migrants. 'I'm not saying I'm always perfect at it. But I at least try to think about, okay, there are obligations that we have to people who, in some ways, are fleeing violence or at least fleeing poverty. I also have a very sacred obligation, I think, to enforce the laws and to promote the common good of my own country, defined as the people with the legal right to be here,' Vance said. 'I really do think that social solidarity is destroyed when you have too much migration too quickly,' he added. 'And so that's not because I hate the migrants, or I'm motivated by grievance. That's because I'm trying to preserve something in my own country where we are a unified nation.'
CNN
21-05-2025
- Politics
- CNN
Vance says Roberts is ‘profoundly wrong' about judiciary's role to check executive branch
Vice President JD Vance called Chief Justice John Roberts' comments earlier this month that the judiciary's role is to check the executive branch a 'profoundly wrong sentiment' and said the courts should be 'deferential' to the president, particularly when it comes to immigration. 'I thought that was a profoundly wrong sentiment. That's one half of his job, the other half of his job is to check the excesses of his own branch. And you cannot have a country where the American people keep on electing immigration enforcement and the courts tell the American people they're not allowed to have what they voted for,' Vance told New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat on the 'Interesting Times' podcast, which was taped on Monday. Vance was responding to Roberts' remarks at an event in Buffalo, New York, where the chief justice stressed the importance of judicial independence. 'The judiciary is a coequal branch of government, separate from the others with the authority to interpret the Constitution as law, and strike down, obviously, acts of Congress or acts of the president,' Roberts said at the event. The judiciary's role, Roberts added, is to 'decide cases but, in the course of that, check the excesses of Congress or of the executive and that does require a degree of independence.' Vance's interview with The Times, which was taped in Rome after he attended the inaugural mass for Pope Leo XIV, also delved into the vice president's Catholic faith and how it shapes his role as a political leader. While Vance said he believes the administration has 'an obligation to treat people humanely,' he also said it's an 'open question' how much due process is 'due' to undocumented immigrants. 'I've obviously expressed public frustration on this, which is yes, illegal immigrants, by virtue of being in the United States, are entitled to some due process,' Vance said. 'But the amount of process that is due and how you enforce those legislative standards and how you actually bring them to bear is, I think, very much an open question.' On Friday, the Supreme Court blocked President Donald Trump from moving forward with deporting a group of immigrants in northern Texas under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act – a win for Venezuelans who feared they were going to be removed under the wartime authority. The administration invoked the powers earlier this year to speed deportations of alleged gang members and has cited national security concerns. Asked about the justification for using those legal authorities to deport people, Vance conceded that 'we don't have 5 million uniform combatants.' But he pointed to thousands of migrants who he said, without evidence, 'intentionally came to the United States to cause violence' to argue that courts need to be deferential to the president on what he called a 'public safety' issue. 'I think that the courts need to be somewhat deferential. In fact, I think the design is that they should be extremely deferential to these questions of political judgment made by the people's elected president of United States,' Vance said. 'People under appreciate the level of public safety stress that we're under when the president talks about how bad crime is.' When asked how he would define success on immigration after Trump's term, Vance also pointed to the courts. 'Success, to me, is not so much a number, though, obviously I'd love to see the gross majority of the illegal immigrants who came in under Biden deported,' Vance said. 'Success, to me, is that we have established a set of rules and principles that the courts are comfortable with and that we have the infrastructure to do that, allows us to deport large numbers of illegal aliens when large numbers of illegal aliens come into the country.' Vance acknowledged he's sometimes had to reconcile his faith with the administration's policy decisions while going on to defend its actions on immigration. 'I understand your point and making these judgments, if you take the teachings of our faith seriously, they are hard. I'm not going to pretend that I haven't struggled with some of this, that I haven't thought about whether, you know, we're doing the precisely right thing,' Vance told Douthat. 'The concern that you raise is fair, there has to be some way in which you're asking yourself as you go about enforcing the law – even, to your point, against a very dangerous people – that you're enforcing the law consistent with, you know, the Catholic Church's moral dictates and so forth.' Douthat interjected, 'And American law and basic principles.' 'Most importantly, American law,' Vance said. Asked about his disagreements on immigration with Popes Francis and Leo, Vance – who said he was wearing a tie Francis gifted him before his death – said that you have to 'hold two ideas in your head at the same time' about enforcing border laws and respecting the dignity of migrants. 'I'm not saying I'm always perfect at it. But I at least try to think about, okay, there are obligations that we have to people who, in some ways, are fleeing violence or at least fleeing poverty. I also have a very sacred obligation, I think, to enforce the laws and to promote the common good of my own country, defined as the people with the legal right to be here,' Vance said. 'I really do think that social solidarity is destroyed when you have too much migration too quickly,' he added. 'And so that's not because I hate the migrants, or I'm motivated by grievance. That's because I'm trying to preserve something in my own country where we are a unified nation.'
