Supreme Court bars Trump from firing Library of Congress official for now
By John Fritze, CNN
(CNN) — The Supreme Court on Wednesday blocked President Donald Trump from replacing a top official at the Library of Congress for now, deferring a decision on his emergency appeal until it resolves a pair of related cases.
The move, which came weeks after the appeal was filed and included little explanation, means that Shira Perlmutter will remain the director of the US Copyright Office despite a request from Trump to remove her immediately.
Justice Clarence Thomas, a member of the court’s conservative wing, said he would have granted Trump’s request to allow Perlmutter to be removed while the case is litigated.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly allowed the president to temporarily remove – and therefore control – agencies on the periphery of the executive branch. But the latest case involved a new twist: A government entity that has the word “Congress” in its title and that Perlmutter argued was part of the legislative branch.
“Today, the administration’s unlawful executive overreach was not greenlit by the U.S. Supreme Court,” Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, which represented Perlmutter. “We are pleased that the Court deferred the government’s motion to stay our court order in a case that is critically important for rule of law, the separation of powers, and the independence of the Library of Congress.”
The Justice Department declined to comment for this story.
The court pointed to two cases it hopes to deal with before deciding what to do with Perlmutter. The first centers on Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, who Trump removed earlier this year from the Federal Trade Commission. Slaughter has argued that Congress attempted to protect members of independent agencies like the FTC by requiring a president to show cause before dismissing them.
The justices will hear arguments in that case next month. And the court allowed Trump to remove Slaughter while the case is reviewed.
Another case the court cited on Wednesday deals with Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor Trump attempted to fire in August after a member of his administration alleged she had committed mortgage fraud by reporting two different homes as her primary residence.
Cook remains on the job even though Trump requested the Supreme Court permit her immediate removal. The court will hear that case in January.
The decision puts on hold, for now, a dispute that led to high drama at the Library of Congress when several Trump-appointed replacements showed up at the building in May with a letter from the president purporting to put them in charge. Library officials declined to recognize them as properly appointed and then filed a lawsuit.
Perlmutter has asserted she may have gotten on the president’s bad side with a report she released in May that suggested some copyrighted works used to train artificial intelligence models would likely require licensing – that is, tech companies would have to pay to use that material. Perlmutter’s lawsuit said that Trump “allegedly disagreed” with that report.
Trump removed the former Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, in early May and then attempted to install Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, one of his former private attorneys, as the acting librarian. Days later, a White House official sent an email to Perlmutter asserting that she had also been terminated.
Perlmutter and other library officials have resisted those moves. Robert Newlen is listed as the acting Librarian of Congress on the library’s website. Newlen addressed an audience with that title at the library’s book festival in September, minutes before Justice Amy Coney Barrett appeared on stage to promote her new memoir.
And Perlmutter is still listed as the register of copyrights.
The confrontation is evident on the very page of the written legal briefs both parties submitted to the Supreme Court. On the title page, where the parties of the case are named, Blanche is described by the Department of Justice as the “acting Librarian of Congress.” In the briefs from Perlmutter’s legal team, he is described as the “person claiming to be acting Librarian of Congress.”
In a 2-1 decision earlier this year, a panel of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals said that the register of copyrights is part of the legislative branch, meaning that only a Senate-confirmed Librarian of Congress can remove her, and not the president.
“The executive’s alleged blatant interference with the work of a legislative branch official, as she performs statutorily authorized duties to advise Congress, strikes us as a violation of the separation of powers that is significantly different in kind and in degree from the cases that have come before,” US Circuit Judge Florence Pan wrote.
Pan and another judge who sided with Perlmutter were appointed by President Joe Biden. A third judge, who was nominated by Trump, dissented.
“President Trump exercised his lawful authority as head of the executive branch to remove an officer exercising executive authority,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said Wednesday in a statement. “We look forward to ultimate resolution of this issue by the Supreme Court.”
The Trump administration told the high court in its appeal that the DC Circuit’s decision “contravenes settled precedent and misconceives the Librarian’s and Register’s legal status.” That’s partly because the register of copyrights, it argued, performs “executive functions,” such as taking part in meetings with foreign governments about copyright issues, which it described as “an increasingly sensitive issue in international diplomacy.”
“Treating the Librarian and Register as legislative officers would set much of federal copyright law on a collision course with the basic principle that Congress may not vest the power to execute the laws in itself or its officers,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the court in the emergency filing.
This story was updated with additional reporting.
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