How the Supreme Court expanded Trump's power

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Mark Joseph Stern** (0:20)
Trump should be very, very happy today because he has pretty much enshrined the unitary executive theory into law, and he is our nation's very first unitary executive.

**Ashley Locke** (0:29)
The Supreme Court just gave President Trump more power.
It's Monday, June 29th, and this is Here and Now Anytime from NPR and WBUR Boston. I'm Ashley Locke. Today on the show, justices rule on two big Trump firing cases. And a new bridge is supposed to help with traffic backups between the US and Canada, but the opening is being delayed again.

**Rick Pluta** (1:03)
At the very last minute, due in large part to a tweet from President Trump, it was suddenly canceled.

**Ashley Locke** (1:10)
But first, the Supreme Court released a major decision expanding presidential power today. It overturned nearly a century of president and gave President Trump the authority to fire most independent regulators. However, in a separate but related case, the justices upheld the independence of the Federal Reserve, ruling its members cannot be fired at will.
Indira Lakshmanan learns more with Mark Joseph Stern. He covers the courts and the law for Slate. He starts out explaining the case that looked at the president's efforts to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission, Rebecca Slaughter.

**Mark Joseph Stern** (1:47)
By a six to three vote, the justices ruled that the president may generally remove the heads of independent agencies without good cause, just because he disagrees with them or dislikes their political affiliation. So this allows him to fire Slaughter from the FTC. She was a Democrat, but it will also allow Trump to assert significantly greater control over a range of agencies that Congress designed to be independent, because its leaders are no longer protected from termination by the White House.

**Indira Lakshmanan** (2:17)
All right. But then we saw what seemed like a very different ruling in this five, four vote, the justices halted, at least for now, President Trump's efforts to fire Lisa Cook, the first black woman on the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors. Why was this case different?

**Mark Joseph Stern** (2:32)
So Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the three liberals in the Cook case to create a carve out from the new rule that was announced in Slaughter that said the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors is independent and that independence has been sanctioned by history.
The majority in Chief Justice Roberts' opinion said that there is a special arrangement here that has lasted throughout the American experiments and has insured a central bank that has some independence from the president and that has done our country well. And so in light of this sort of unique history, the court was unwilling to allow the president to remove a member of the Federal Reserve at will. He has to have a good reason. And the majority said that Trump has not yet proved his reasons for firing Lisa Cook. He claims she committed mortgage fraud, but she hasn't had an opportunity to rebut those claims. And until that happens and he proves his case, she will remain on the Board of Governors.

**Indira Lakshmanan** (3:31)
But has the court effectively left the door open?

**Mark Joseph Stern** (3:36)
So that's a very good question. Justice Kavanaugh wrote a concurrence saying, this does not conclusively resolve this dispute. So there is a chance that the lower courts could give Lisa Cook an opportunity to provide rebuttal, and she could not provide sufficient evidence that she is innocent. And Trump could say again, hey, I really do have a right to fire her.
My reading is that still the majority is disinclined to let that happen. What we see in Robert's opinion and also in Kavanaugh's concurrence is deep concern that allowing the president to take control of the Federal Reserve will create turmoil and disaster in the US market and international markets, and that the safer course of action is to continue this history of allowing central bank independence. So my view is that assuming there's not slam dunk evidence against Lisa Cook, and I really don't think there is, the court is going to ensure that she does stay on the Fed throughout her term.

**Indira Lakshmanan** (4:28)
Well, as you say, the court said that this really goes to the independence of the Federal Reserve as this nation's central bank, which is supposed to set interest rates without political interference. We know that throughout his term, this time President Trump has been pressuring the last Federal Reserve Chairman and this current one to change interest rates, although they haven't given in to that pressure. We are going to hear from a former Federal Reserve official elsewhere in the show. But I want to ask you the larger question, which is how significant are these decisions for the power of the president?