The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that President Donald Trump cannot fire Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook, while in a separate case giving him a freer hand to exert control over other previously independent federal agencies, NBC News reported.
The decisions, issued at the same time and both authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, mark another example of the conservative-majority court pushing back on one aspect of Trump’s broad exertion of executive power while giving him the green light on another.
Although the president may not fire Cook for now, the court allowed him to remove a member of the Federal Trade Commission, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter.
In the latter case, the court overturned a key 1935 Supreme Court ruling called Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, that upheld restrictions on the president’s power to fire FTC members, NBC said.
Court Votes Different in Each Case
The court was divided differently in each case, the network said. In the Cook case, the vote was 5-4 with the court’s liberals joining the majority, while they dissented in Slaughter, which was 6-3 on ideological lines.
Only Chief Justice Roberts and fellow conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh were in the majority in both cases.
In the Cook case, Roberts rejected the Trump administration’s contention that the president’s firing of Cook for cause — over allegations of mortgage fraud, which she denies — could not be reviewed in court and that Cook could not stay in office while contesting the decision.
“To accept any of those arguments would in effect transform the Federal Reserve’s for-cause protection into at-will employment,” Roberts wrote.
Such a step would be “out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference,”the chief justice wrote.
Cook Welcomed Decision
In a statement, NBC said that Cook welcomed the decision, saying that Trump’s actions were “an attempt to remove me on a manufactured pretext because I refused to bow to political pressure and continued to set interest rates based only on what would best serve the American people.”
In a footnote, Roberts said the ruling did not bar Trump from trying again to remove Cook over the alleged mortgage fraud if he chose to do so.
But the ruling said Trump’s first attempt failed because Cook was not given the due process she was owed under federal law, CNBC reported. Any new move against her would require additional steps, including an explanation of the evidence against her, a way for her to respond, and a deadline for that response.
“And only then can the courts assess the validity and sufficiency of such charges,” Roberts wrote.
Trump, wrote in a post on Truth Social after the ruling, that the court had sent the case back “on a strictly procedural basis” and vowed to take further action against Cook.
