When the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in June that Donald Trump couldn’t fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, some optimistic commentators hoped he might move on to projects less financially ruinous than ending the Fed’s independence. No such luck. The Court held that Trump had not given Cook the procedural protections the law requires, so she remains in her post while her challenge proceeds.
So Trump has now supplied the process: a White House “committee of inquiry,” staffed by his own appointees, that will hold a hearing on Nov. 5 on the same unproven mortgage-fraud accusations and report back on whether there are grounds to remove her.
The New York Times has the story:
The committee set to hear Ms. Cook’s arguments includes Kevin Hassett, the president’s top economic adviser; Keith Sonderling, the acting director of the Office of Government Ethics; and Andrea Lucas, the head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The unique nature of the arrangement—and Mr. Trump’s persistent hostility toward the Fed—sparked ire among Democrats in Congress. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, described the entire setup on Friday as a “kangaroo court” of Mr. Trump’s making. ...
… Peter Conti-Brown, an expert on Fed governance at the University of Pennsylvania, said that there was a clear pretense in the president’s renewed efforts to fire Ms. Cook. “There’s no plausible scenario where Lisa Cook is given a fair hearing, because a fair hearing is not what the Trump administration is trying to do,” he said, pointing out Mr. Trump’s oft-repeated desire for lower interest rates.
Trump has not bothered to hide what he holds against Cook. He told reporters that she is “an automatic no vote” on lowering interest rates and “that’s not a good thing.” One of the committee’s three members, Hassett (whom Steve Chapman profiled for The UnPopulist here), has already said the president has cause to fire her, which is one reason Cook’s lawyers called the panel “demonstrably biased” in an Oct. 13 letter.
Trump has, in a sense, given the Court what it asked for: a hearing, before judges of his own choosing, one of whom has already announced the verdict. Whether this is enough process to satisfy the justices remains to be seen.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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