What an incredible judicial duel. The erstwhile head of the federal Office of Special Counsel, Hampton Dellinger, increasingly resembles, professionally speaking, Schrödinger’s Cat. Does he have his job? As of this writing, it seems like the answer is no. Stand by, though. In 2024, President Biden appointed Mr. Dellinger to a five-year term. By law, he supposedly can’t be fired without cause. President Trump terminated his employment on February 7. 

On February 12 a United States district judge, Amy Berman Jackson, reinstated Mr. Dellinger temporarily. A panel on the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the reinstatement. The Supreme Court declined to intervene. Then, on Saturday, Judge Jackson decided — definitively, this time— that Mr. Dellinger could keep his job. On Wednesday, another panel on the circuit court overruled her, saying that Mr. Dellinger will have to stay fired.

That is, until a third panel of circuit riders gets to hear the dispute — sometime after mid-April. Part of the reason for these dueling rulings, one can surmise, is the political complexion of these berobed sages. Judge Jackson is a nominee of President Obama. The first panel to hear the case in the D.C. circuit, which upheld Mr. Dellinger’s reinstatement, included two Biden nominees and the third judge, a Trump nominee, dissented.

A subsequent panel in the D.C. circuit, which just reversed Judge Jackson’s reinstatement of Mr. Dellinger, included one Obama nominee, one Trump nominee, and one nominee of President George H.W. Bush. The next question in Mr. Dellinger’s case is whether the Supreme Court, which features five associate justices, and one chief justice, nominated by Republicans, will wade into the dispute or wait for a final circuit court ruling.

Then again, too, the Supreme Court might opt to sit this one out, as it did when Judge Jackson first put Mr. Dellinger back at his desk. The high court’s failure to intervene, at that early stage, denied Mr. Trump a quick win in the case, while still leaving room for an ultimate vindication. So it’s a moment to maintain a close eye on the Supreme Court’s docket for new filings this week in Bessent v. Dellinger. This could happen any moment.

The status of Mr. Dellinger’s job is catnip for editorialists because the stakes in this dispute are enormous. Dellenger is the first of its kind in Mr. Trump’s second term to reach — if only briefly — the Supreme Court. The case, too, could prove critical to deciding whether the president will be able to make good on his vow to clean the Augean stable of the federal bureaucracy.

The case bears, too, on constitutional questions like the separated powers and the scope of the presidency. The Sun’s view is that since the Constitution vests all the powers of the executive branch in the president alone, he or she must have the power to fire any executive branch employee. Otherwise, the president’s duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” would be irreparably impaired.

A thicket of measures enacted by Congress since the advent of Civil Service reform, which the Sun has opposed at least since 1883, has given rise to a powerful Deep State of unelected federal bureaucrats — like Mr. Dellinger. Judge Jackson finds that these laws protect him from being fired, in part because he has no “significant executive authority.” Yet Mr. Dellinger has been leading a kind of resistance movement among fired federales. 

Which brings us back to Erwin Schrödinger’s cat, subject of a famous thought experiment. The notional cat is put in a closed box along with a potentially lethal device. The cat is deemed both alive and dead until one opens the box. Schrödinger called such a state “quite ridiculous.” Like Messrs. Dellinger’s and Trump’s predicament. One could credit Mr. Dellinger for clinging to his post with a feline tenacity, though cats have but nine lives.