President Trump delays tariffs on Mexico
President Trump has agreed to delay tariffs on Mexico for one month.
A federal judge has reinstated a member of the national board that protects the right of workers to unionize and handles union disputes with employers, saying President Donald Trump’s firing of her was an illegal use of his executive power.
The decision reinstates Gwynne Wilcox to the National Labor Relations Board. Former President Joe Biden nominated, and the Senate confirmed her, to a term that ends in 2028. But Trump fired Wilcox and her colleague, Jennifer Abruzzo, in an email around 3 a.m. on Jan. 28.
“The president seems intent on pushing the bounds of his office and exercising his power in a manner violative of clear statutory law to test how much the courts will accept the notion of a presidency that is supreme,” Beryl Howell, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., wrote in her decision.
Wilcox’s lawyers pointed to a federal law that allows the president to remove a member of the board for “neglect of duty or malfeasance in office, but for no other cause” and said that no member of the National Labor Relations Board had been fired in its history. The judge agreed with Wilcox.
“In the ninety years since the NLRB’s founding, the President has never removed a member of the Board,” Howell wrote. “His attempt to do so here is blatantly illegal, and his constitutional arguments to excuse this illegal act are contrary to Supreme Court precedent and over a century of practice.”
The Department of Justice argued on behalf of the Trump administration that the law protecting Wilcox from at-will firing was unconstitutional. It said the National Labor Relations Board held executive authority that was borrowed from the president.
“The proper remedy for an (allegedly) unlawful termination of a federal officer as here is backpay,” the department wrote. “It is not commandeering an executive agency and forcing the President to work alongside a subordinate in whom he has no trust.”
At a hearing Wednesday, Howell, a nominee of former Democratic President Barack Obama, asked Gregory Beck, Wilcox’s attorney, to explain the origin and importance of the National Labor Relations Board.
“Labor strife was endemic in the United States, and it often resulted in violence,” Beck said of labor relations prior to the board’s creation in 1935. “People died. Strikes broke out all the time.”