A Biden-era legal win that allowed the president to fire certain board members set the stage for President Donald Trump to can several people who sat on the Kennedy Center board.
Former Trump press secretary Sean Spicer – one of the plaintiffs in that case, Spicer v. Biden – told Fox News Digital that, evidently enough, the suit was ‘about sending a message to the President of the United States.’
With Trump under fire for removing multiple Kennedy Center board members earlier this month, Spicer says his loss is Trump’s win.
‘The idea was to make sure that the Republican Party in the future had the legal backing to do what President Trump is doing now,’ Spicer said.
Upon starting his term in 2021, President Joe Biden attempted to remove Spicer, current director of the Office of Management and Budget Russ Vought and others from their positions on the Board of Visitors for the Naval Academy.
Spicer and Vought were serving statutory terms on the Naval Academy board after being appointed by Trump during his first term. Spicer’s term was set to expire in December 2021.
At the time, he was also serving on the Commission of White House Fellows, to which he submitted his resignation shortly after Biden entered the Oval Office.
On Sept. 8, 2021, Spicer and Vought received a letter from the White House Presidential Personnel Office, stating, ‘I am writing to request your resignation from the Board of Visitors to the United States Naval Academy. If we do not receive your resignation by end of day today, you will be terminated,’ according to the initial complaint.
Spicer said he would not be resigning. America First Legal, founded by current Trump White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, approached the board members with the proposal to pursue a lawsuit against the Biden administration.
‘This is about sending a message to make the President of the United States go to court and argue that he had the right to fire any of these people,’ Spicer said. ‘It was America First Legal that came up with the strategy, and we were the two appointees that agreed to be the example.’
Spicer said the suit ‘was not about getting back on the board,’ and the irony of it all was that the goal was to lose the case in the courts.
‘The goal was to make sure that a future Republican president had the legal backing to clean house when they came into office and to be able to point to President Biden as the reason,’ Spicer said.
The suit was ultimately dismissed by the district court while the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled in a similar case, Severino v. Biden, that a presidential appointee similar to Spicer and Vought could be removed by the president at will.
‘America First Legal is proud to have represented Sean in this case, which established clear precedent that the President has the authority to remove any presidentially appointed official,’ an AFL spokesperson told Fox News Digital in a statement.
‘I think it was sort of to acknowledge that, even though it was unprecedented because the Kennedy Center Board had always been bipartisan, there was nothing to prevent Donald Trump from doing exactly that – appointing the trustees whom he wanted, and then having those trustees vote to have him become chairman of the Kennedy Center Board,’ John Malcolm, vice president of the Institute for Constitutional Government at the Heritage Foundation, told Fox News Digital.
Since the start of his second term, Trump and his administration have become the targets of over 70 lawsuits over his executive orders and directives, many of which seek to delineate how much power the executive branch truly has.
On Friday, the Supreme Court paused the Trump administration’s efforts to dismiss former head of the Office of Special Counsel, Hampton Dellinger, after a lower court reinstated the Biden appointee to his post.
In its initial appeal to the high court, the Trump administration argued that the judiciary is attempting ‘to seize executive power’ as courts have blocked the president from firing certain federal employees.
Likewise, just several weeks back, Trump’s Justice Department penned a letter to Congress stating that it was seeking to overturn a landmark Supreme Court case in an effort to give the president greater control over independent three-letter agencies.
‘The idea would be [that] we have a unitary executive and all that means is in Article II of the Constitution, that vests all executive branch authority in one president,’ Malcolm said. ‘And the idea is that if you are an executive branch official, it is implied that the Constitution gives the president the authority to keep those officials or not keep those officials so that if they are not properly implementing executive branch policies, that the buck stops with the president and he can fire people.’
Amid the legal pushback toward the Trump agenda, Spicer said, in hindsight, he and AFL ‘took a page out of [Trump’s] book to begin with.’
‘I think Trump, from the day he came down the escalator at Trump Tower, basically told conservatives, ‘Stop being such wusses and learn to fight back,’’ Spicer said. ‘So, it was Trump in 2015, 2016 that made it clear that conservatives don’t have to sit and take it anymore. We can fight back. And that was kind of the notion of this lawsuit.’