By John Kruzel
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Donald Trump’s administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday to let him temporarily remove a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission as the legal fight over the Republican president’s dismissal of her plays out.
The Justice Department made the request after Washington-based U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan blocked Trump’s firing of Rebecca Slaughter from the consumer protection agency that enforces antitrust law prior to her term expiring.
AliKhan ruled in July that Trump’s attempt to remove Slaughter did not comply with removal protections in federal law. Congress put such tenure protections in place to give certain regulatory agencies a degree of independence from presidential control.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Tuesday in a 2-1 decision upheld the judge’s ruling, prompting the Trump administration’s request to the Supreme Court.
The lower courts ruled that the statutory protections shielding FTC members from being removed without cause conform with the U.S. Constitution in light of a 1935 Supreme Court precedent in a case called Humphrey’s Executor v. United States.
In that case, the court ruled that a president lacks unfettered power to remove FTC commissioners, faulting then-President Franklin Roosevelt’s firing of an FTC commissioner for policy differences.
The Trump administration in its Supreme Court filing on Thursday argued that “the modern FTC exercises far more substantial powers than the 1935 FTC,” and thus its members can be fired at will by the president.
(Reporting by John Kruzel; Editing by Will Dunham)
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