Library of Congress official Trump tried to fire can keep her job for now, Supreme Court says
By John Fritze, CNN
(CNN) — The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected an effort by President Donald Trump to fire a top official at the Library of Congress for now, a move that will allow her to remain in her post while her case is reviewed by lower courts in light of the court’s blockbuster decisions on presidential power earlier this week.
The move means that Shira Perlmutter will remain the director of the US Copyright Office despite a long-pending request from Trump to remove her immediately.
In a brief order, the court stressed that it was not ruling on the merits of the legal issues raised by Trump’s claim.
Trump launched a battle with the Library of Congress last spring. The president removed the former Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, in early May and then attempted to install then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, one of his former private attorneys, as the acting librarian. He also attempted to fire Perlmutter at the Copyright Office, which is part of the library.
Last fall, the Supreme Court paused action in the Perlmutter kerfuffle while the court resolved two other major cases dealing with the president’s power to fire members of the executive branch. On Monday, the court resolved those cases, granting president’s broad power to remove the leadership at independent agencies within the executive branch. But one of Perlmutter’s arguments is that her position is part of the legislative branch, which she has argued should make her out of Trump’s reach.
The dispute led to high drama last year when several Trump loyalists 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 claimed she got on the president’s bad side with a report 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. Days later, a White House official sent an email to Perlmutter asserting that she had also been terminated.
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.
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.
The-CNN-Wire
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