BREAKING: The U.S. Supreme Court announced on Wednesday that it will not grant the Trump administration’s request to allow it to fire Shira Perlmutter, the director of the Copyright Office, at this time.

Instead, the court put off any decision while the court is considering two other cases involving efforts by President Donald Trump to fire people. Rebecca Slaughter, who was an FTC Commissioner, will have her case heard in December, and Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve Board of Governors member, will have her case heard in January.

Perlmutter, like Cook, stays in office during that time.

Justice Clarence Thomas would have let the administration put Perlmutter’s firing into effect during litigation.

The Copyright Office is under the Library of Congress, and the fight over this purported firing has therefore been different due to statutory and historical involvement of Congress in running the Library of Congress.

The purported firing of Perlmutter, unlike Cook, was not directly from Trump. Instead, Trump fired the Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, and attempted to install Todd Blanche — the deputy attorney general (and Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer) — as the acting librarian. Blanche then purported to fire Perlmutter.

I think one way Wednesday’s move can make sense is if viewed through that lens. Whatever the court decides in Slaughter and Cook will — regardless of outcomes — address some first-level questions in Perlmutter’s case, or at least set some rules and standards for addressing them, as to the Hayden firing and effort to install Blanche. Only then can the court actually look at the purported Perlmutter firing.

And yet, as with Cook, the decision in this environment for the Supreme Court to block the administration for months on end is, subtly or not, sending a sign. And, the Court’s conservatives chose to send the opposite sign when the question was about Slaughter — and others.

Finally, and never to be ignored, the move to interfere with the Library of Congress also led to a different, and more bipartisan, outcry from Congress than some of Trump’s other attempted firings.

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