President Donald Trump obtained a court victory Wednesday after an official in the copyright department filed a lawsuit against her firing.
Trump has been trying to cut down the size of government, as well as root out political opponents by firing various officials and employees, but Democrats have argued that he is acting unconstitutionally in some cases.
Perlmutter would not be irreparably harmed if she continued to be unemployed.
Shira Perlmutter, former director of the U.S. Copyright Office, filed an emergency bid to reinstate her employment, but U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly ruled in favor of the government. Perlmutter had claimed that the firing was “unlawful and ineffective.”
Kelly ruled that Perlmutter would not be irreparably harmed if she continued to be unemployed as the case progressed.
Democratic Rep. Joe Morelle of New York had accused the administration of firing Perlmutter over a dispute about artificial models that would benefit tech billionaire Elon Musk.
“Donald Trump’s termination of Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, is a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis. It is surely no coincidence he acted less than a day after she refused to rubber-stamp Elon Musk’s efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models,” wrote Morelle in part.
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“This action once again tramples on Congress’s Article One authority and throws a trillion-dollar industry into chaos. When will my Republican colleagues decide enough is enough?” Morelle added.
Perlmutter is also arguing in her lawsuit that the firing threatens the separation of powers of the federal government insofar as the Copyright Office is intended to advise Congress, and the executive branch firing officers imperils that balance.
Kelly was nominated by Trump to the court in 2017.
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