The Trump administration’s first major legal battle reached the Supreme Court on Sunday.
In an emergency application, President Donald Trump asked the justices to allow him to fire the leader of an agency dedicated to protecting whistleblowers, Hampton Dellinger, after a lower court ordered his reinstatement.
Dellinger, appointed by former President Joe Biden to run the Office of Special Counsel, sued Feb. 7 shortly after Trump removed him from the position.
Though the lower court’s order only reinstates Dellinger temporarily, Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris wrote in the petition that it “involves an unprecedented assault on the separation of powers that warrants immediate relief.”
“Until now, as far as we are aware, no court in American history has wielded an injunction to force the President to retain an agency head whom the President believes should not be entrusted with executive power and to prevent the President from relying on his preferred replacement,” it continues.
“Yet the district court remarkably found no irreparable harm to the President if he is judicially barred from exercising exclusive and preclusive powers of the Presidency for at least 16 days, and perhaps for a month.”
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals denied Trump’s effort