The Supreme Court Doesn’t Want to Break the Fed

It seems very highly probable that the Supreme Court will allow Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook to remain in office despite President Donald Trump’s attempt to fire her. It’s less clear whether the justices will find a way to make the case go away altogether, or whether they will send it back to the lower courts for additional fact-finding or further discussion of the two difficult legal questions in the case: what the for-cause requirement protecting Fed governors from politically motivated removal actually means, and what process a president must follow to fire someone for cause.

Frequently, the justices try to lower the temperature in high-profile, headline-grabbing cases by smothering the lawyers — and by extension, the public — in opaque legal jargon. This time, the justices acknowledged the real-world facts right out of the box at Wednesday’s oral argument. Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked Solicitor General John Sauer about a friend-of-the-court brief filed by prominent economists suggesting that if the court were to overturn a lower court’s stay and allow Cook to be fired forthwith, “we could trigger a recession.”