A federal judge in Washington. D.C., this week strongly rejected a request by the Trump administration to pause her own order mandating the reinstatement of previously-fired, Joe Biden-appointed Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter. And, in doing so, the judge also rejected comparisons to a recent series of highly-contentious U.S. Supreme Court rulings on similar issues.

In a seven-page order, U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan, a Joe Biden appointee, denied a Wednesday request by the U.S. Department of Justice to stay her July 18, ruling which found that Slaughter”s firing was “invalid” and declared her to be “a rightful Commissioner of the FTC.”

“On irreparable harm, Defendants’ motion is woefully deficient,” the judge intones in the order rejecting the stay request. “This court will not permit Defendants to continue engaging in unlawful action on the mere basis of ‘some possibility of irreparable injury.'”

In the underlying case – as in many such cases concerning fired political appointees that have caught the D.C. federal court system’s attention during the second Trump administration – a great deal of the legal analysis is focused on a 1935 Supreme Court opinion about limitations on the president’s ability to fire appointed officials at will.

The case in question, Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S., stands for the idea that Congress intended to keep “quasi judicial and quasi legislative” agencies largely insulated from the whims of the president.

AliKhan, in her earlier order reinstating Slaughter, cited the 90-year-old case at length. The court noted the “facts” of Slaughter’s present case “almost identically mirror” those in Humphrey’s Executor. Further, the judge found, the unanimous high court ruling was clear that “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance” are the only viable causes for firing an FTC commissioner.

The court again turns to the case in her latest order.

From the ruling, at length:

[U]nless the Supreme Court expressly overrules Humphrey’s Executor, which speaks directly to removal protections for FTC Commissioners, this court will not usurp the Supreme Court’s “prerogative . . . to overrule one of its [own] precedents.” Even when a lower court believes that existing “precedent is in tension with some other line of decisions,” it cannot unilaterally assume that established law has been “implicitly overruled.” Until the current Supreme Court speaks clearly as to the fate of Humphrey’s Executor, this court cannot—and will not—presume that a ninety-year-old ruling is no longer good law.

The court’s strong defense of Humphrey’s Executor comes in the context of the Trump administration’s reliance on a series of recent, non-merits rulings by the Supreme Court’s GOP-appointed justices, that have called the 90-year-old opinion into question.

The government’s basic argument is clear enough: it says such so-called “for-cause” removal language is unconstitutional.

Their arguments track with those made in a series of similar cases earlier this year, when President Donald Trump fired appointed members of the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), Office of Special Counsel, and National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

After months of litigation in each case, the nation’s high court, in various non-merits decisions, gave Trump the power to effectively fire such appointees.

Through all this, however, because the justices have refused to address the merits – by granting tersely-worded stays instead – Humphrey’s Executor is still on the books, if in name only.

But for AliKhan, the Supreme Court’s refusal to face Humphrey’s Executor head-on deals a death blow to the DOJ’s request. And, the district judge, for her part, does not see enough similarity between the high court’s earlier pro-Trump stay rulings to change her mind.

“[T]he Supreme Court’s stay order was an initial, four-paragraph assessment of two complicated cases without ‘full briefing and argument,'” the order goes on. “The Court expressly ‘d[id] not ultimately decide . . . whether the NLRB or MSPB falls within . . . a recognized [Presidential-removal] exception.’ This court will not turn a preliminary determination (about agencies not at issue here) into a license to contravene Supreme Court precedent that has stood for almost a century.”

Notably, however, the lower court’s order has already been stayed – by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. That stay was granted two days before the Trump administration asked AliKhan to stay her own order. The judge had some thoughts on that as well.

Again, the order, at length [emphasis in original]:

While the D.C. Circuit’s internal procedures instruct that “[i]f the district court . . . denies the [stay] relief requested, an application may then be made to [the D.C. Circuit],” Defendants declined to wait for the ordinary stay process to play out. On July 21, only a day after this court set its briefing schedule, they filed an emergency motion for a stay pending appeal and an administrative stay of this court’s order in the D.C. Circuit. While Defendants briefly mentioned that they had sought a stay in this court, they neglected to inform the Circuit that briefing on the motion was ongoing, nor did they assert that seeking a stay in the district court would be “impracticable.”

…

The parties completed briefing on this court’s stay motion yesterday, and they will compete briefing on their stay motion in the D.C. Circuit by July 29. While the D.C. Circuit’s administrative stay freezes the proceedings independently of any action by this court, the court nevertheless feels obligated to discharge its independent duty under [the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure] to rule on the stay motion pending before it.

The court also takes the opportunity to address public policy concerns – in a direct rejoinder to DOJ arguments that the reinstatement order infringes on “the President’s constitutional prerogative to control those who wield executive power.”

Here, AliKhan is withering.

“Put differently, they complain that the court’s order blocks them from illegally dismantling the independence of an agency that Congress deliberately shielded from executive overreach,” the judge goes on. “To entertain that complaint would make a mockery of the FTC, to say nothing of the separation of powers. As always, the public maintains a heavy interest ‘in having governmental agencies abide by the federal laws that govern their existence and operations.’ No matter how Defendants try to spin it, this court cannot grant them relief without contravening that critical interest. Because the court refuses to allow Defendants to continue breaking the law while this litigation proceeds, it is hereby ORDERED that Defendants’ Motion to Stay is DENIED.”