It’s like Democrats think that the Chief Executive cannot fire people who work in the Executive Branch, that they’re all protected
Trump’s power to fire executive branch officials will be tested in another lawsuit
A federal ethics enforcer swept up in a spree of firings President Donald Trump carried out Friday night is suing to get his job back.
The lawsuit from Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger is the latest case that will test the president’s power to fire officials across the executive branch despite federal laws that seek to protect those officials from politically motivated firings.
Dellinger was appointed by President Joe Biden to lead the Office of Special Counsel, which has no connection to the similarly titled special counsel offices that handle politically sensitive criminal cases at the Justice Department. The office enforces federal whistleblower laws and the Hatch Act — the main statute limiting political activity by federal employees. The office also fields complaints from veterans about discrimination upon their return from military service.
Dellinger sued Monday in federal court in Washington after being sacked Friday in an email sent by Sergio Gor, director of the Presidential Personnel Office in the White House.
So, they can be appointed by presidents, but, not fired by presidents? Or just when it is a Republican president? Because Biden sure fired a lot of Trump appointees.
McMahon said Dellinger’s office was like others where the courts have upheld the president’s authority to remove political appointees even when Congress tried to impose so-called “for-cause” removal protections.
But the judge also sounded skeptical of that argument, saying the special counsel post isn’t really a policymaking position.
“They don’t have a big bureaucracy underneath them. … It’s much more of a hands-on operation,” Jackson said, calling the office “a tiny little agency with a very narrow, little function, which is to protect people of either party from reprisal for whistleblowers against someone in either party.”
Any appointed position serves at the pleasure of the president. Most resign and go do something else when there is a party switch, but, Democrats no longer want to go, they want to jam up the system. But, supposedly
Various laws govern how the president can remove political appointees. Many can be dismissed by the president at will. But some appointees — particularly the members of so-called independent agencies, including the Office of Special Counsel — have statutory protections that limit the reasons they can be fired.
“The Special Counsel may be removed by the President only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office,” Congress wrote in the 1978 law creating the post.
OK, how about how many of the whistleblowers during the Biden administration were treated poorly? That would have been Dellinger’s job to take care of them.
Legal challenges to Trump’s firings could send the issue back to the Supreme Court. In addition to Dellinger’s lawsuit, a Biden appointee to the National Labor Relations Board, Gwynne Wilcox, sued last week after being dismissed by Trump last month. The statute governing Wilcox’s position allows removal “for neglect of duty or malfeasance in office, but for no other cause.”
The White House said in its letter dismissing Wilcox that that language “does not operate as a restriction on [the president’s] ability to remove Board members” — a sign that Trump will argue in court that the Constitution gives him broad and perhaps unlimited power to dismiss executive branch employees and that efforts by Congress to impose so-called for-cause restrictions on that authority are unconstitutional.
So, Trump and future Republicans must deal with hardcore leftists in positions of power? What sense does that make?
There really could be issues with civil service laws, depending on how things are done.
Political appointees can obviously be discharged, but in the civil service it might be that their positions have to be eliminated. We’ve seen “reductions in force” before, with positions eliminated, but if the positions remain open, the people who held those positions have some form of civil service protection.
The President does have, unambiguously, the authority to tell people to do nothing in their jobs.
From X- “Democrats have identified two groups they’ll go to the mattresses to defend: illegal immigrants and government employees. What a platform!”
They aren’t defending government employees. They are defending the programs those agencies spend funds on. Those funds go to contracts. Those contracts put money back into the pockets of those Democrats. The same is true for immigrants. Billions going to contracts to care for the immigrants = Billions going into the pockets of connected democrats getting those no-bid contracts. Never accuse Democrats of having empathy for others. It’s about the money. It’s always been about the money.
And Musk has some $20 BILLION of those contracts that HE wants to keep AND reduce restrictions on them.
The best one is the Obama-appointed judge telling the Secretary of Treasury that he cannot access Treasury payment methods. This lawsuit was brought at midnight on a Friday by 19 BLUE STATES to prevent Elon Musk from finding out how much money is going to places it shouldn’t.
The left, in their mock outrage, who always…..always wanted to end waste, fraud, and abuse is now suddenly all about preventing the discovery of waste, fraud, and abuse….because it was always a GREAT CAMPAIGN SLOGAN but never something any Democrat wanted to DO….especially once they got to DC. They found out it was going to LEFTIST CAUSES
Opps, never mind…….TRUMP IS HITLER!! Rather than lets fix the budget, fix the deficit and fix whats wrong with an out of control government spending, run by drunken sailors on shore leave.
US Presidents are not kings. They have to obey US laws. They have to obey court orders or fight them in court.