The Trump administration’s first major legal showdown has reached the Supreme Court, according to new report. In an emergency application filed Sunday, President Donald Trump urged the justices to grant him the authority to dismiss Hampton Dellinger, the head of an agency tasked with protecting whistleblowers, after a lower court ordered his reinstatement.
Dellinger, appointed by former President Joe Biden to lead the Office of Special Counsel, filed a lawsuit on February 7 shortly after Trump removed him from the position. Although the lower court’s order reinstates Dellinger only temporarily, Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris argued in the petition that the case represents “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 rejected Trump’s attempt to overturn the lower court’s temporary reinstatement order in a 2-1 decision on Saturday, citing that such rulings are generally not subject to appeal. The Trump administration petition also asks the justices to “end the practice whereby courts seize Article II powers for two weeks, yet disclaim the availability of any appellate review in the meantime.”
Trump’s early executive actions have faced multiple temporary restraining orders, including blocks on his funding freeze and his restriction on federal funds for hospitals that perform child sex-change procedures. White House officials have condemned these rulings as judicial overreach, arguing that they unjustly obstruct legitimate exercises of executive authority.
“The First Congress rejected the idea that the President would need to obtain the Senate’s advice and consent to remove a principal executive officer,” Harris wrote in the petition. “No one imagined that the President might need to obtain the advice and consent of a federal district court.”
