SCOTUS Hands Trump Win In Consumer Product Safety Case

The U.S. Supreme Court temporarily agreed on Wednesday that President Trump can fire three Democrat members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

In its 6-3 decision, the justices granted an application filed by the Trump administration to stay a June 13 district court order attempting to block the president from firing the officials in question. As described by The New York Times, the five-member group “monitors the safety of items like toys, cribs and electronics.”

According to Wednesday’s order, the temporary stay will remain in effect “pending the disposition of the appeal in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and disposition of a petition for a writ of certiorari, if such a writ is timely sought.” The stay will terminate if a potential petition from the government to SCOTUS is denied by the high court or if SCOTUS agrees to take up the matter and hands down a final judgment in the case.

All three Democrat appointees would have denied the administration’s application.

In a concurring opinion, Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that in addition to granting the request for stay, he would have also agreed to take up and decide the case’s merits, or grant “cert.” The Trump appointee noted that the high court’s failure to offer a definitive judgment on the matter in a quick fashion could “leave the lower courts and affected parties with extended uncertainty and confusion about the status of the precedent in question.”

“Moreover, when the question is whether to narrow or overrule one of this Court’s precedents rather than how to resolve an open or disputed question of federal law, further percolation in the lower courts is not particularly useful because lower courts cannot alter or overrule this Court’s precedents. In that situation, the downsides of delay in definitively resolving the status of the precedent sometimes tend to outweigh the benefits of further lower-court consideration,” Kavanaugh wrote. “So it is here. Therefore, I not only would have granted a stay but also would have granted certiorari before judgment.”

Writing for the dissent, Associate Justice Elena Kagan accused the majority of using the “emergency docket to destroy the independence of an independent agency, as established by Congress.” She further claimed that the actions of her Republican-appointed colleagues in granting the administration’s stays in such cases will result in “an increase of executive power at the expense of legislative authority.”