A federal appeals court issued a ruling Tuesday restoring Rebecca Slaughter to her post on the Federal Trade Commission, saying President Trump’s move to fire her contradicted existing law.
The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, in a 2-1 decision, said the Supreme Court ruled 90 years ago that FTC members could only be fired for cause.
The majority upheld a lower court ruling that Ms. Slaughter’s ouster was illegal. They also overturned a stay that had been issued by a different panel of the appeals court, which had allowed Mr. Trump to block Ms. Slaughter from regaining her position while the case moved through the courts.
“The government is not likely to succeed on appeal because any ruling in its favor from this court would have to defy binding, on-point, and repeatedly preserved Supreme Court precedent. Bucking such precedent is not within this court’s job description,” said Judges Cornelia Pillard and Patricia Millett, both Obama appointees to the court.
Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee, dissented.
She said the FTC wields executive power, and so it must be responsive to the president.
She said the Supreme Court has allowed Mr. Trump’s firings to stand in several other cases involving similar agencies, so she would have applied that to the FTC as well.
“An injunction ordering reinstatement of an officer removed by the president likely exceeds the Article III judicial power and encroaches on the president’s exercise of the Article II executive power,” she said.
The case hits directly at an ongoing issue about how much fealty lower court judges should pay to Supreme Court rulings on the “emergency docket.” Those are cases that rush to the justices in a preliminary posture and are handled without full argument.
The Trump administration has produced a flurry of those rulings.
Some legal experts say emergency docket rulings do not have significant precedential value. That’s particularly true in this case, where the 1935 ruling in Humphrey’s Executor case specifically shielded an FTC commissioner from firing by President Roosevelt.
But some recent Supreme Court rulings have urged lower courts to pay attention to the emergency docket rulings, leaving confusion about how to handle cases like Ms. Slaughter’s firing.