Happy Labor Day. Donald Trump and Elon Musk Are Screwing Workers.

If our notional employer still feels wronged after the NLRB board rules against him, he or she can file an appeal in federal court. I half expected the Fifth Circuit judges to further complain that the president can’t fire federal judges (only Congress can remove them through impeachment), but they stopped short of condemning an independent judiciary as an intolerable infringement on presidential power.

Let’s clarify here that although it seems as though President Donald Trump is trying to fire every living federal employee, he is not, at the moment, trying to fire any administrative law judges at the NLRB. Neither was President Joe Biden when Musk first filed his suit. So why are the Fifth Circuit’s knickers in a twist about whether a president can fire an administrative law judge? Let’s further clarify that no administrative law judge has heard the Space X case, nor the two similar cases with which the Space X suit was joined, because all three companies won lower-court injunctions before such hearings could take place. So how exactly were these companies harmed? “When an agency’s structure violates the separation of powers, the harm is immediate,” the Fifth Circuit said, “and the remedy must be, too.” Apparently the NLRB has been harming all of us since Will Rogers’s small plane went down near Point Barrow, Alaska. Four generations failed to notice.

The ruling doesn’t shut down the NLRB entirely because it applies only to cases in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, where the Fifth Circuit has jurisdiction. But Jennifer Abruzzo, who was President Joe Biden’s NLRB general counsel, told me that the decision will “open the floodgates for employers to forum-shop and seek to get injunctions” in those three states. Abruzzo added that the NLRB “should be appealing this, seeking a rehearing,” but it’s doubtful that it will.