A federal judge on Thursday reinstated Gwynne Wilcox, a Democratic member of the National Labor Relations Board, declaring that President Trump’s attempt to fire her was unlawful.
The ruling, which the Trump administration immediately moved to appeal, was a rebuke of Mr. Trump’s expansive view of executive power and his efforts to establish presidential control over agencies designed by Congress to be independent from the White House.
Judge Beryl A. Howell, appointed to the Federal District Court in Washington by President Barack Obama, excoriated Mr. Trump’s vision of unchecked authority in her 36-page ruling, referring to a declaration he had made during the 2024 campaign that he would be a dictator on “Day 1” and to an image that the White House shared of Mr. Trump wearing the crown of a king.
“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” Judge Howell wrote.
She later continued that “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.”
Ms. Wilcox did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Her ouster, in January, had the effect of paralyzing the N.L.R.B., which hears labor disputes, because it left the board with just two members — a Republican and a Democrat — and, by federal law, the board cannot act without a minimum of three members.
She swiftly filed a lawsuit, one of several cases that could wind up before the Supreme Court as a test of the reaches of executive authority.
In a lengthy hearing in the case on Wednesday, before the ruling, Judge Howell made a joke about the case’s possible trajectory, saying that she understood that “this court is merely a speed bump for you all to get to the Supreme Court.”