The Supreme Court leaves Trump’s firing of a labour board member in place

The Supreme Court will not review Trump’s firing of a labor board member, Reuters coverage of Monday’s order list reported⁴. Bloomberg described the outcome as the Court rebuffing the ousted National Labor Relations Board member, and as a win for the president¹. The New Republic reported that the Court has enabled Trump in the cases of Slaughter and now Wilcox, but that it has drawn the line with Lisa Cook, a governor on the Federal Reserve Board³.

The same order list identified the cases the Court intends to hear and denied those it will not, among them the petition in Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, et al. v. United States⁵. The Court denied a bid by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the September 11 attacks, to reinstate plea agreements that would have spared him and two co-defendants the death penalty, which keeps the death penalty available as the defendants move toward a military trial date in June 2028^5,9.

Why it matters to investors

The question running through these cases is how far a president may remove officials at agencies Congress built to be independent^1,3. That is the same question that hangs over the Federal Reserve, and the New Republic’s reading is that the Court has so far treated the Fed differently from the labour and trade agencies³. Lawyers for the Fed’s Lisa Cook have been contesting a White House hearing set up by Trump⁴.

For markets the practical stake is not the labour board itself but the precedent. Each refusal to hear a removal challenge narrows the legal ground on which a Fed governor could resist dismissal, and the Court has not yet ruled on Cook’s own case^3,4.

What to watch

The Court agreed to hear a challenge to the Reconstruction-era federal ban on distilling alcohol in private homes, reviewing Department of Justice v. McNutt, in which the 5th Circuit found the nearly 160-year-old ban unconstitutional and an overreach of Congress’ taxing power^2,6. Home distilling currently carries a penalty of up to five years in prison, a $10,000 fine or both, and the 6th Circuit reached the opposite conclusion from the 5th⁶.

The justices also took up a new case over race and school admissions, which Bloomberg described as a claim of bias in an admissions policy^7,8. Both grants will be argued this term, and both turn on how far the current majority will extend its reading of federal power and of equal protection^6,7.