President Donald Trump has reminded the Supreme Court that it gave him almost absolute immunity last year and the “unrestricted power” to fire federal officials.
The statement came in his appeal to the Supreme Court after a lower federal court blocked him from firing special counsel Hampton Dellinger.
Why It Matters
On July 1, 2024, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Trump, and any other president, had absolute immunity for core presidential actions and presumptive immunity for noncore presidential acts.
The current appeal that Trump has taken to the Supreme Court is the first real test of that presidential power since Trump resumed office on January 20.
President Donald Trump signs a series of executive orders in the Oval Office at the White House on February 10, 2025. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
What To Know
Former President Joe Biden appointed Dellinger as special counsel in charge of an office where federal workers could safely report corruption and wrongdoing.
Trump’s office fired Dellinger on February 7 with a one-line email.
On February 12, Washington, D.C., federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson reinstated Dellinger until she held a full hearing on February 26.
In a February 16 Supreme Court appeal of Berman Jackson’s ruling, acting Solicitor General Sarah M. Harris relied heavily on the Supreme Court’s July 1 ruling on presidential immunity.
“As this Court observed just last Term, ‘Congress cannot act on, and courts cannot examine, the President’s actions on subjects within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority’ —including ‘the President’s unrestricted power of removal with respect to ‘executive officers of the United States whom [the President] has appointed,’” Harris wrote.
Harris quoted the Supreme Court as stating that the president has “unrestricted power to remove” the most senior federal officers he has appointed. She wrote that “enjoining the President and preventing him from exercising these powers thus inflicts the gravest of injuries on the Executive Branch and the separation of powers.”
What People Are Saying
Judge Amy Berman Jackson, in her February 12 decision reinstating special counsel Hampton Dellinger: “Defendants imply that it would be too disruptive to the business of the agency to have Special Counsel Dellinger resume his work. But any disruption to the work of the agency was occasioned by the White House.”
“It’s as if the bull in the china shop looked back over his shoulder and said, ‘What a mess!’” she wrote.
What Happens Next
The Supreme Court has yet to say whether it will hear Trump’s appeal. If it does, it would likely be expedited, given the seriousness of the issue and the potential conflict it causes within the executive branch of government.
Harris has asked the Supreme Court for “an immediate administrative stay of the district court’s order pending the Court’s consideration of this application.”
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