President Trump terminated Donald Kinsella as U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York just hours after federal judges voted to install him in the role. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the move on social media, declaring that judges "don't pick" U.S. attorneys.

Kinsella, a veteran federal prosecutor, was appointed by the district's judges to fill the vacancy left when Trump appointee John Sarcone's temporary term expired. The installation and termination happened the same day — a sequence that distills the broader constitutional clash over who actually controls federal law enforcement into a single afternoon.

The Vacancy Trap

According to Fox News, here's how the mechanism works. The president nominates U.S. attorneys. The Senate confirms them. When the Senate refuses to act, the president can install a temporary appointee for 120 days. If that window closes without confirmation, federal law allows district court judges to appoint a replacement.

That's exactly what happened in the Northern District of New York. Sarcone's temporary term ran out. Last month, Judge Lorna Schofield disqualified him over the expired tenure. The judges filled the seat with Kinsella, as the statute permits.

Trump fired him anyway.

The question isn't whether the judges acted within the law. Even legal scholars sympathetic to broad executive power concede they did. John Yoo, a former Justice Department official and law professor at UC Berkeley, told Fox News Digital that the judges' move was legal due to a quirk in the federal vacancy statute. But Yoo argued that it doesn't limit the president's constitutional authority to remove Kinsella — or anyone else exercising executive power.

"No matter how an executive officer is appointed … none of these positions under the Constitution have any specific way to remove the officers, and so the president can remove all officers in the executive branch, particularly all officers in the Justice Department."

Yoo grounded this in Article II and the take care clause — the constitutional bedrock that vests enforcement of federal law in the president alone. The Constitution, he noted, spells out elaborate procedures for appointing officers but says nothing about removing them.

"It has elaborate procedures … about how you appoint them to office. It doesn't actually discuss at all how you remove them from office."

The implication is clear: appointment mechanisms don't create firewall protections. A court-appointed U.S. attorney still serves at the pleasure of the president.

Blue-State Obstruction

None of this would be happening if Democratic senators weren't weaponizing the confirmation process. Trump has struggled to secure Senate confirmations for U.S. attorney nominees in New York, California, Nevada, New Jersey, and Virginia — all blue states where home-state senators invoke the "blue slip" tradition to block nominees they don't like.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has ruled out approving any of Trump's nominees in New York. His stated reasoning, offered after Kinsella's firing:

"Everyone knows Trump only cares about one quality in a U.S. Attorney — complete political subservience."

Schumer also characterized Trump as seeking an unqualified "political loyalist" — a charge that conveniently ignores the entire constitutional design. The president is supposed to choose who enforces federal law. That's not a bug. It's the system. Voters elected Trump; they didn't elect the judges of the Northern District of New York to set prosecutorial priorities.

Yoo put it plainly:

"Otherwise, you could have U.S. attorneys who are enforcing federal law differently than the president would, and it's the president who all of us in the country elect and to whom the president is accountable."

What Schumer frames as protecting independence is, in practice, creating a shadow prosecutorial apparatus answerable to no one the public voted for. Block the nominees, run out the clock, let judges install their own picks, then cry foul when the president exercises the authority the Constitution gives him.

A Pattern Across Multiple Districts

The Northern District of New York isn't an isolated case. The same dynamic is playing out across the country.

• In New Jersey, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit upheld a lower court's finding that Alina Habba was unlawfully serving past her temporary term. Trump subsequently fired the court-appointed replacement.
• In the Eastern District of Virginia, a judge found that top prosecutor Lindsey Halligan was improperly appointed and tossed her high-profile indictments against New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey.
• The DOJ is appealing both the Schofield decision disqualifying Sarcone and the ruling against Halligan. None of these cases has reached the Supreme Court.

Federal judges have uniformly found that Trump cannot repeatedly reappoint the same person to consecutive temporary terms — a reading that effectively hands control of these offices to the judiciary the moment the 120-day clock expires. DOJ attorneys acknowledged the stakes in court papers filed in Habba's case:

"It is important that a DOJ component is overseen by someone who has the support of the Executive Branch, and that a U.S. Attorney's Office can continue to function even when there is no Senate-confirmed or interim U.S. Attorney."

That's the core of the administration's argument, and it's a serious one. A U.S. attorney's office that operates outside the president's direction isn't independent — it's unaccountable.

The Constitutional Question That Won't Go Away

Yoo drew an important distinction in his analysis: under existing law and Supreme Court precedent, an official like the attorney general cannot remove court-appointed U.S. attorneys like Kinsella. But the president can. The removal power flows directly from the Constitution, not from any statute, and no statute can take it away.

"Any subordinates who are carrying out federal law have to be accountable to him."

This will eventually reach the Supreme Court. The current patchwork — judges installing prosecutors, the president immediately fires, the DOJ appealing disqualifications district by district — is unsustainable. Every unresolved case creates another vacancy, another judicial appointment, another termination, another appeal. The feedback loop only breaks when the highest court weighs in on whether the president's removal authority extends to officers he didn't appoint.

Until then, the pattern holds. Democratic senators block nominees. Temporary terms expire. Courts fill the seats. The president clears the board. Kinsella didn't even last a full day.

The Constitution doesn't give federal judges prosecutorial authority. No quirk in a vacancy statute changes that — and no amount of blue-slip obstruction rewrites Article II.