Transcript: Trump’s Firing of Lisa Cook Backfires as Brutal Poll Hits
Ford: I would expect it in the sense of the Fed, but with a caveat. I am heartened that a large majority of Americans feel that way. But I think that certain Americans’ voices will carry more weight, both with the administration and with the court, on this—and that’s wealthy Americans. That’s Americans who are involved in finance, who are involved in investments, who are involved in banking, and who make decisions on that front, who know intimately the dangers that come with having a central bank—we’ll set aside the preciseness of the Federal Reserve structure, and we’ll just call it a central bank for simplicity’s sake—that is only obedient to immediate political authority. One of the things that Congress sought to do was balance the idea that institutions should be representative and accountable to the people while also maintaining that separation, so they have staggered terms.
No president should theoretically be able to appoint a majority of governors to the board at any one time. They have these removal protections. They have other insulatory measures coupled with them. And I think those are going to be important not just to ordinary Americans—they certainly should be to ordinary Americans—but to donors, to CEOs, to business leaders, to all sorts of people who know intimately how these structures function and how important their independence is to function well in the economy.
Sargent: Well, you brought up the Supreme Court. Can I ask: Where do you see this all going? Let me ask it like this. We should acknowledge that as buffoonish as all this is, Trump controls the Justice Department apparently. And they’re doing this, as we said, with three of Trump’s enemies—Lisa Cook, Senator Adam Schiff, and New York Attorney General Letitia James. And in all these cases, referrals have been made to the Justice Department. DOJ is apparently investigating in the Cook and Schiff cases. Where do you expect all this to go? What comes before the Supreme Court exactly? Is it the effort to fire Cook, and what happens?
Ford: Well, that’s a really good question, and it’s going to be one that we’re going to probably have an answer on fairly soon. Cook has filed a lawsuit challenging her apparent removal.
I don’t think we have very good information from within the Fed whether she is still performing her duties or not. My understanding is that she is, but I don’t think we have solid reporting on that yet. The Fed certainly isn’t publicly announcing it; they were very elliptical in their own statement on the matter. But they are going to go to a district court and they are going to try to get an injunction. Cook is. And what she’s going to do is argue that, Look, you either need—she said this in her lawsuit—Humphrey’s Executor completely gone. Humphrey’s Executor was the Supreme Court case in 1935 that upheld these protections. But you also need to get past the Trump v. Wilcox. That was a decision earlier this year—a shadow docket decision—where the court said, Hey, we will allow the president, I’m paraphrasing obviously, the president can fire members of the National Labor Relations Board, but we’re just going to throw out that he can’t fire members of the Federal Reserve, that there’s different factors at play here.
