President Donald Trump is moving ahead with taking control of the Federal Reserve, and Columbia University Law School professor Lev Menand wrote in the Atlantic that the Supreme Court made it all possible.
Trump submitted a letter purporting to fire Fed board member Lisa Cook over unproven accusations of mortgage fraud in his bid to stack the board with loyalists. But Menand said the Supreme Court made fighting his dismissal difficult by tossing bedrock precedent and accepting broad assertions of presidential power.
“The Court has created the conditions for a very dangerous situation,” Menand said. “If the justices allow Trump’s removal of Cook to take effect, there will be little to stop him from driving other board members from their posts, and seizing power over the [nation’s] money supply.”
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Trump already enjoys the benefit of practically no pushback from the Republican-controlled Congress, which leaves the Supreme Court as the only real barrier to total power. And while the court did recently carve out some exceptions to the wide authority it gave Trump to fire tenured officials in Trump v. Wilcox, the Court’s carve-out was not very helpful.
“Part of the problem is that it doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Menand said. “[The Fed] is legally equivalent to the other multimember commissions that Trump is attacking. Nor is it quasi-private; it is an ordinary government agency. Nor does it really seem to follow in the tradition of the Bank of the United States, which was a bank. The Federal Reserve Board is a bank regulator.”
In its haste to give Trump unprecedented new power, the Court also failed to specify if Trump couldremove officials while litigation is ongoing. This gives Trump “an incentive to remove people even if the administration thinks the president may ultimately lose the case.”
And the administration is already putting that new power to the test, said Menand, targeting Fed governors and publicly airing alleged grounds for dismissal without “even an indictment.” Menand added that if the courts now permit Cook’s removal without Cook having an opportunity to contest the charges “we shouldn’t be surprised” if the president next attempts to remove Fed Chair Jerome Powell.
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"Lisa Cook’s case is … about the rule of law and whether this is ‘an Empire of Laws, not of men,’” Menand said.
Read the full Atlantic report at this link.