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CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig slammed a district court judge for making an “inappropriate” jab at President Donald Trump in a decision revoking his move to fire the chair of the National Labor Relations Board, accusing her of getting “quite political” during a Thursday evening appearance on the network.

Host Kaitlan Collins set the stage for Honig at the top of the segment:

 A federal judge has just ruled tonight that President Trump’s firing of the National Labor Relations Board chair was illegal. In a scathing decision that came out, we heard from the U.S. district court judge, Beryl Howell, who wrote, quote, “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, but may be constrained in appropriate circumstances as present here.” It’s the third time in less than a week that we’ve seen a federal judge rule that President Trump’s firing of independent agency heads is unlawful. My top legal source tonight is CNN’s senior legal analyst Elie Honig. And Elie, what did you make of the ruling? Were you surprised by this?

“Not surprised at all, Kaitlan, because most fundamentally, Donald Trump broke the law and he doesn’t even contend otherwise. Now, Congress passed a law saying that this particular NLRB official can only be removed if there&

#8217;s notice, and a hearing, and good cause. Trump didn’t care, he just said you’re fired without regard to any of those things,” answered Honig. “But the key thing to keep in mind here is Donald Trump is not playing for the district court, the trial court where we were today, he’s playing for the Supreme Court, and he knows that this case, or one of the other firing cases is going to make its way up to the Supreme Court, where he will argue that it’s unconstitutional for Congress to pass those kind of laws because he’s in charge of the executive branch, and he will argue he can do what he wants within the executive branch. Would not surprise me to see the Supreme Court take one of those cases, would not surprise me to see Trump win in the Supreme Court.”

“Yeah, we don’t know. I mean, obviously everyone’s been watching Justice Amy Coney Barrett, especially when it comes to how she sided with the other justices on the USAID funding,” observed Collins before asking Honig to react to the tenor of Howell’s opinion. “But on this tonight, you know, what Judge Howell did right, is at one point, she said, ‘The president, who touts an image of himself as a king or as a dictator, perhaps as his vision of effective leadership,

fundamentally misapprehends the role,’ as she accuses him of exactly what you’re laying out there, a court to test the presidency and the limits of it.”

“I think that is an overstatement by the judge and frankly, a misstatement of Donald Trump’s actual legal argument in this case. I think the judge is actually getting quite political there in a way that undermines her credibility,” argued Honig.

“Donald Trump is making a perfectly reasonable, good-faith argument that as the elected head of the executive branch, he controls the executive branch. That is very much in dispute. That’s a reasonable argument to make. That’s not the same thing as saying he’s a king or, in another part of the decision, the judge even refers to his comments that he’s a dictator. That’s outside stuff, that’s political. I think it was inappropriate and not even correct for the judge to characterize it that way.”

Watch above via CNN.

 

 

Tags: Beryl Howell, Donald Trump, Elie Honig