A Republican loss in a Biden-era case involving former Trump press secretary Sean Spicer paved the way for President Donald Trump to fire members of the Kennedy Center board and install members loyal to him, Fox News reported.

The 2021 case was brought by Spicer, who wanted to lose in order to establish the precedent that a president can fire appointed officials at will.

The suit was "about sending a message to the President of the United States," Spicer told Fox Digital.

"The idea was to make sure that the Republican Party in the future had the legal backing to do what President Trump is doing now," he added.

A sneaky strategy

In 2021 when he took office, then-President Joe Biden tried to remove Spicer and other Trump appointees from the Board of Visitors for the Naval Academy.

The original complaint in the case said that on Sept. 8, 2021, Spicer and Vought received a letter from the White House Presidential Personnel Office, stating, "I am writing to request your resignation from the Board of Visitors to the United States Naval Academy. If we do not receive your resignation by end of day today, you will be terminated."

Spicer refused to resign, and the strategy to force Biden's hand was hatched.

"This is about sending a message to make the President of the United States go to court and argue that he had the right to fire any of these people," Spicer said. "It was America First Legal that came up with the strategy, and we were the two appointees that agreed to be the example."

He wasn't trying to get back on the board, he said, but to prove that a future Republican president could fire the previous one's appointees.

The goal

"The goal was to make sure that a future Republican president had the legal backing to clean house when they came into office and to be able to point to President Biden as the reason," Spicer said.

Spicer's suit was dismissed by the courts, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled in another case, Severino v. Biden, that an appointee like Spicer could be removed at the current president's will.

Democrats who are up in arms over Trump's Kennedy Center firings and the fact that the new board members he appointed voted him to be the board's president really don't have a leg to stand on because of these cases.

That won't stop them from trying; they've already filed 70 lawsuits challenging Trump's executive orders and other actions as president.

It's a question of whether the judiciary has the right to usurp executive power--they don't, and they shouldn't.