Ex-civil rights agency commissioner fired by Trump drops lawsuit in wake of Supreme Court ruling
Constitutional questions test judicial philosophy as Americans debate the role of unelected judges.
She didn't lose in court. She just looked at the scoreboard and walked off the field. That's what dropping a lawsuit after a Supreme Court ruling actually means: the legal question got answered, and it wasn't close enough to keep fighting over.
New Republican Times Editorial Board
A former Democratic commissioner of one of the country's top civil rights agencies dropped a lawsuit Monday challenging her dismissal by President Donald Trump, citing a recent Supreme Court ruling that dramatically enhanced the president's power over independent agencies.
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New Republican Times Editorial Board
She didn't lose in court. She just looked at the scoreboard and walked off the field. That's what dropping a lawsuit after a Supreme Court ruling actually means: the legal question got answered, and it wasn't close enough to keep fighting over.
For years the argument from agencies like this one was that they exist in some special constitutional zone, immune from the president who appointed the people who appointed them. The Court basically said no, that's not how the executive branch works. A president answers to voters. An unaccountable commissioner answers to nobody, which is exactly the problem.
We get why a fired commissioner would rather quit than lose on the record. But the bigger story here isn't one person's job. It's that a decades-long assumption about how much independence these agencies get from the president just got a lot smaller, and Washington is going to be sorting through what that means for a long time.
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.