Thank you to fired Manhattan federal prosecutor Maurene Comey for fighting back and winning her lawsuit Monday that last year’s termination ordered by an angry President Donald Trump was not legal and violated the Constitution.

But, this being the vindictive Trump administration, hours later, the Department of Justice filed clearly phony criminal charges against her dad, former FBI Director Jim Comey, for the third time, after the first two specious cases collapsed.

In Maurene’s case, Manhattan Federal Judge Jesse Furman resoundingly slapped down another effort by the administration to overstep the boundaries of its executive authority by ordering the reinstatement with back pay of Comey, whom former Trump Attorney General Pam Bondi fired last year.

Furman ruled that the firing of Maurene Comey — an accomplished career prosecutor whose ouster seems obviously motivated by Trump’s personal animus towards her dad — was unlawful.

The administration had made two main arguments: one, that the firing was allowed by federal law, which permits attorneys general to terminate assistant U.S. attorneys. As Furman wrote, the law only allows it with significant caveats like establishing clear cause, not done here.

Second and more darkly, the administration argued that the law didn’t matter anyway, because Congress lacked the power under the Constitution to restrict the president’s firing of executive employees, leaning on recent Supreme Court decisions letting Trump fire ostensibly independent regulators. The judge pointed out longtime precedent that holds that Congress can impose restrictions on the firing of so-called inferior officers, i.e. those working underneath presidential appointees.

As with most court opinions, this one is full of granular statutory analysis, but running through it all is a more fundamental principle: that permitting the chief executive to fire not only high-level appointees but essentially any government employee on a whim, based on political considerations, would tug at the thread of our entire constitutional system, threatening to unravel it.

The president is, of course, democratically elected and has the right to appoint executive officers that will broadly speaking carry out a governing vision, but that does not give him the inherent right to staff the whole of the federal bureaucracy with politically friendly officials and fire those he doesn’t like.

A nonpartisan, experienced and standing federal workforce might not be a particularly flashy aspect of our democratic order, but it is no less a pivotal support for it. We need people who can make decisions in the public interest — whether over who to charge with a crime, what standards food and drugs need to meet to be sold, the significance of weather patterns, which countries are too risky to send people back to, and so on — and not base their decisions on the political whims of the White House.

Trump is not, after all, the CEO of America, nor is he king, and the millions of public servants throughout dozens of government agencies and departments don’t just work for him, but for the people.

Hopefully, Comey’s reinstatement will signal to other prosecutors that they don’t have to go along with Trump’s prosecutions of political opponents (like is happening against Jim Comey) and that they may indeed face consequences for doing so. Their oath is to the Constitution, not to any one president.

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