President Donald Trump is continuing his pressure campaign against Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell while simultaneously trying to persuade the Supreme Court to grant him broad firing power over the independent central bank. Trump’s latest threat to fire Powell only underscores the importance of Fed independence that the justices have already signaled they recognize.

The pending high court case concerns the president’s power to remove Lisa Cook from the Fed’s Board of Governors long before her Senate-confirmed term is up in 2038. Powell himself isn’t directly at issue in the Cook case, though the administration’s apparently baseless criminal probe into the Fed chair could make the justices even more likely to take steps to secure the central bank from undue presidential interference.

The Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority has treated Trump’s bid to remove Cook with rare skepticism, during a presidential term in which the court has broadly bolstered his powers. The justices let her stay in her position pending the outcome of the litigation, and the court majority has shown that it views the independence of the Fed as more important than other agencies it has let Trump single-handedly reshape.

In an unrelated case last year in which the court backed Trump’s power to fire labor board members without cause, the majority emphasized that it wasn’t ruling on protections for the central bank’s board of governors, even though the Fed wasn’t at issue in the labor appeal. That led Justice Elena Kagan to criticize the majority’s “out of the blue” Fed carve-out, as she suggested that the Republican appointees were attempting to “reassure the markets” while otherwise endorsing the president’s firing spree at other agencies.

Whatever the majority’s motivations, the bottom line is that the Cook case could wind up being another rare but significant loss for the president during this Supreme Court term, following the ruling against him in the tariffs case and the likely impending loss in the birthright citizenship case. The January hearing in the Cook case further suggested that the administration will lose. Trump appointee Brett Kavanaugh said Trump’s stance “would weaken, if not shatter, the independence of the Federal Reserve.” The court is next due to issue rulings on Friday morning, though it doesn’t announce which ones are coming ahead of time.

So, even putting aside the threat to Powell, the Cook case outcome isn’t looking great for Trump. Powell might not even be mentioned one way or the other in the Cook ruling when it comes out. But to the extent that the justices are looking out into the real world for examples of why the vaunted financial entity needs protection from a rogue president, this one continues to provide evidence backing up that notion. And of course, if Trump tries to fire Powell, then the court could wind up stepping in on that case as well, likely starting from a skeptical position.

Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.

The post Trump keeps pressuring Powell ahead of the Supreme Court’s Fed independence ruling appeared first on MS NOW.

Author: Source Author

From MS Now.