Anger at supreme court ruling on Trump’s power to fire agency chiefs – US politics live

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In a significant victory for the president on Monday, the court granted him the ability to fire leaders of some independent US agencies at will, in a move one advocacy group called “disastrous.”

The decision to expand presidential powers overturns a precedent set in 1935, rowing back a guardrail put in place to protect agencies against corruption and political interference.

“Our authoritarian president was just handed the keys to be even more authoritarian, and the long-term consequences will no doubt be disastrous,” said Rachel Rossi, the president of Alliance for Justice, a progressive judicial advocacy group.

Supreme court justice Sonia Sotomayor has blasted the decision, calling the ruling “egregiously wrong,” and “the one thing that does appear to be clear going forward is that chaos will follow.”

During his second presidential term, Trump has successfully fired the leaders of several agencies, including Gwynne Wilcox, the first Black woman to serve on the National Labour Relations Board.

Trump failed in his bid however to remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, with the court ruling in a 5-4 opinion that Trump’s attempt to fire her from the Fed was unconstitutional. Trump has targeted Cook, the first Black woman to serve on the Fed’s board, over unproved allegations of mortgage fraud.

The court also rejected Trump’s attempt to change rules for late-arriving mail-in ballots. Trump has claimed that such ballots are vulnerable to fraud. The states that currently count postal ballots which arrive late mostly lean towards the Democrats.

On Tuesday, the supreme court is poised to make a decision on another of Trump’s key policies: his push to remove birthright citizenship, which grants US citizenship to almost anyone born in the country, regardless of their parents’ status. On the first day of his second term in office, Trump issued a presidential order overturning the practice set out in the 14th amendment to the US Constitution.

The court is also set to publish rulings on a Republican challenge to campaign finance limits and state restrictions on transgender athletes competing in school and college sports.

In other developments:

• The supreme court rejected Trump’s request to review a 2023 verdict from a New York jury that found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming the writer E Jean Carroll.

• Trump announced that he is nominating Keith Sonderling to serve as US secretary of labor, a role he is now filling as acting secretary after Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s announced her departure in April. As acting secretary, Sonderling threatened to withhold administrative funds from states for the first time in history, warning that there will be no tolerance for “blatant waste, fraud, and abuse”.

• The US military is racing to vaccinate new recruits after a two-month halt on mandatory flu shots – but it’s a temporary reprieve, as the shots will soon expire and new doses will not be available for months.