Rebecca Slaughter, fired Federal Trade Commission member, asks Supreme Court to keep her on the job

The Federal Trade Commission member fighting to keep her post over President Trump’s firing has asked the Supreme Court not to undo a lower court’s order allowing her to stay on the job.

Rebecca Slaughter asked the justices on Friday not to grant Mr. Trump’s emergency request to halt a lower court order reinstating her because she was terminated “without cause.”

Her lawyers say in a court filing that the 1935 Supreme Court case Humphrey’s Executor v. United States involved “the exact same provision of the FTC Act that Ms. Slaughter sets to enforce.” They say lower courts are expected to follow Humphrey’s Executor because it has not been overruled.

“This Court should not grant an administrative stay where the court below simply ‘follow[ed] the case which directly controls,’ as it was required to do,” her court filing read.

The dispute involves Ms. Slaughter, whom Mr. Trump removed from the FTC in March along with another Democratic member.

A lower court had ruled that Mr. Trump’s firing was illegal, citing the 1935 precedent.

The Trump administration had asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to intervene, reminding the conservative-led justices that they have upheld the president’s firings on three other occasions.

“In this case, the lower courts have once again ordered the reinstatement of a high-level officer wielding substantial executive authority whom the President has determined should not exercise any executive power, let alone significant rulemaking and enforcement powers,” U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer said.

Earlier in the week, a federal appeals court in a 2-1 decision rejected Mr. Trump’s move to fire Ms. Slaughter, reasoning she could stay on the job while the litigation proceeds.

Previously, the high court has sided with Mr. Trump in his firing of officials at the National Labor Relations Board, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Merit Systems Protection Board.

The Slaughter case hits directly at an ongoing issue about how much fealty lower court judges should pay to Supreme Court rulings on the “emergency docket.” Those are cases that rush to the justices in a preliminary posture and are handled without full arguments.

The Trump administration has secured a flurry of those rulings.

Some legal experts have said the emergency orders are not binding precedent for lower courts to abide by.

That’s particularly true in this case, in which the 1935 ruling in Humphrey’s Executor case specifically shielded an FTC commissioner from firing by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

But some recent Supreme Court rulings have urged lower courts to pay attention to the emergency docket rulings, leaving confusion about how to handle cases like Ms. Slaughter’s firing.

The case is Donald J. Trump v. Rebecca Kelly Slaughter.