A federal judge, while reinstating a fired member of the National Labor Relations Board, declared that President Donald Trump is not a king and can't remove federal officials and civil servants as if he were a monarch.
"An American President is not a king — not even an 'elected' one — and his power to remove federal officers and honest civil servants like plaintiff is not absolute," U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell for the District of Columbia wrote, while restoring the employee, Gwynne Wilcox, to her job, reports ABC News on Thursday.
Wilcox, who said Trump fired her without providing a cause, brought her case in February to challenge her dismissal.
In her lawsuit, she said that the administration's "string of openly illegal firings" could become a "test case" of the limits of presidential power.
Howell, a 2010 appointee of then-President Barack Obama, sided with Wilcox in her 36-page ruling, stating that Trump's interpretation of his presidential powers is a violation of the U.S. Constitution and poses a risk of causing lasting damages in the United States.
"The President does not have the authority to terminate members of the National Labor Relations Board at will, and his attempt to fire plaintiff from her position on the Board was a blatant violation of the law," Howell wrote.
"The President's interpretation of the scope of his constitutional power — or, more aptly, his aspiration — is flat wrong," she also said.
Howell cited posts made by Trump on Feb. 19 on his Truth Social page and the White House on other social media.
Trump, while celebrating his administration's move to kill New York City's congestion pricing program, posted "CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!"
The White House then put the message on Instagram and X with an illustration of Trump wearing a crown and pictured on a magazine cover that resembled Time, but was called Trump, reports The New York Times.
"A President who touts an image of himself as a 'king' or a 'dictator,' perhaps as his vision of effective leadership, fundamentally misapprehends the role under Article II of the U.S. Constitution," Howell wrote in her ruling.
She also said that Trump has been testing the limits of his powers before the courts stop his actions.
"The President seems intent on pushing the bounds of his office and exercising his power in a manner violative of clear statutory law to test how much the courts will accept the notion of a presidency that is supreme," Howell said.
Her decision also mentioned the "unitary executive" theory that a president can exercise complete control over the government's executive branch and suggested the Wilcox case could be used as a way to turn a long-time "academic exercise" about presidential power into law.
"To start, the [Constitution's] Framers made clear that no one in our system of government was meant to be king — the President included — and not just in name only," she wrote, adding that the structure of the Constitution "was designed to ensure no one branch of government had absolute power."