The Trump administration is urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to reverse a ruling by a federal judge to reinstate Cathy Harris, chair of the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, after she sued to regain her position in response to being booted last month. The Justice Department points to a district court judge that made “the same error recently” in another firing case that the appellate court “corrected” last week — saying a stay is “equally warranted here.”

The other termination case saw Hampton Dellinger, a fired-then-reinstated ethics enforcer who led the Office of Special Counsel, being ousted for good by the D.C. Circuit last Wednesday following weeks of legal jousting and the threat of a Supreme Court battle. Like Harris, Dellinger fought his firing with a lawsuit in federal court, which led to a temporary restraining order (TRO) being issued by U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson and put in place until the appellate court provided its ruling.

“(Harris) insists that the district court was empowered to restore her to office,” the DOJ said Thursday in a filing showing support for an emergency stay on the lower court’s order, which was handed down by U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras, a Barack Obama appointee, in a 35-page memorandum opinion on March 4. “But as this Court recently explained, requiring the President to ‘recognize and work with an agency head whom he has already removed impinges on the conclusive and preclusive power through which the President controls the Executive Branch that he is responsible for supervising,” the DOJ said, citing and quoting from the D.C. Circuit’s ruling in Dellinger directly. “Because the district court committed the same error recently corrected in Dellinger, a stay is equally warranted here.”