The Highest Court or Trump’s HR Department - The President Who Makes Power Over Copyright Dance

Once upon a time, there was a court that watched over laws. Today, it seems to be managing résumés. On Monday, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court of the United States to allow it to dismiss the head of the US Copyright Office - a decision that sounds less like the rule of law and more like personnel policy. One could now get the impression that the Supreme Court is no longer the highest court in the land but Trump’s HR department. At the center of it all is Shira Perlmutter, the Register of Copyrights, an internationally recognized expert and adviser to Congress. She was appointed to the position in 2020 by then Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden - that is, by an institution not under the president’s authority. But that hardly bothers Donald Trump. For him, the separation of powers is an annoying administrative obstacle that prevents him from placing “his people” wherever expertise, integrity, or dissent still reside.

Perlmutter learned by email from the White House in May that her position as director of the Copyright Office was “terminated effective immediately” - allegedly because she had given Congress a recommendation in a report on artificial intelligence that Trump disapproved of. One might almost say: wrong opinion, wrong job. A federal appeals court in Washington then ruled that the president could not simply remove the head of the Copyright Office. The majority of the court called it a “blatant interference by the executive with the work of an official of the legislative branch.” Judge Florence Pan wrote in her opinion that this case differed “in kind and in degree” from earlier dismissals that the Supreme Court had allowed Trump to make. In other words, this is not about administration but about the hollowing out of the separation of powers.

But Trump rarely lets such things stop him. The president, who stacks judges like building blocks, once again went to the Supreme Court - the very body that has so often ruled in his favor in recent years. In his filing, Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that the head of the Copyright Office “wields executive power” even though she is assigned to Congress. That sounds like a legal pirouette that would have made even Kafka pause: because someone decides on copyrights, they are suddenly part of the executive branch - and can therefore be fired by the president. Meanwhile, Perlmutter’s lawyers are defending their client for what she is: one of the world’s leading experts on intellectual property. She is not being removed for incompetence but for disobedience - a pattern that runs through the Trump era like a refrain. Where expertise meets power, loyalty wins.

Ironically, all of this is taking place in the sphere of the Library of Congress - an institution meant to preserve knowledge. Trump, however, sees knowledge as a threat unless it belongs to him. After already dismissing Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden - the first Black woman to hold the position - he installed his confidant Todd Blanche, the former Deputy Attorney General, at the top of the library. The new mission: less reading, more loyalty. What used to be called the balance of powers now looks like a one-way street to the White House. The Supreme Court, meanwhile, is examining whether the dismissal is permissible - and increasingly resembles an office for personnel approvals. Perhaps the court will soon have its own case codes for Trump decisions: SCOTUS HR-2025.

So the question remains how many institutions must still fall before someone realizes that power without limits is not strength but fascism. Shira Perlmutter may be only the head of an agency, but her case stands for something larger - for the last bastion of a system that refuses to turn itself into a casting show. In the end, the Supreme Court’s ruling could mean more than a personnel matter. It will determine whether American democracy continues to rest on law - or on obedience. And while arguments are being weighed in the courtroom, someone in the White House may already be dancing to the melody of his own power.