Can Trump Really Not Fire the Fed Chairman?

The Supreme Court is handing President Trump a win in his drive to curb the deep state and reform the executive branch by allowing him, for now, to fire board members of federal agencies. Yet the Nine also suggests that Mr. Trump lacks power to terminate board members of the Federal Reserve, which the high court majority calls a “uniquely structured, quasi-private entity.” Where’s the logic in exempting the Fed from the president’s constitutional prerogatives?The court’s apparent offer of job security to Fed board members emerged in an unsigned order in a case that has no direct link to the central bank. Trump v. Wilcox centers on two Biden appointees to agencies that “exercise considerable executive power,” the Nine said. Letting Mr. Trump fire those two appointees, but not the Fed chief, raises concerns that the high court is more interested in mollifying financial markets than in a clear reading of the Constitution.What else to make of the fact that the high court granted Mr. Trump’s request to fire Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board and Cathy Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board, even as litigation is pending challenging their terminations? The court justified the move by noting that the “Constitution vests the executive power in the President,” so “he may remove without cause executive officers who exercise that power on his behalf.”The high court’s majority in Trump v. Wilcox concedes that there are some limits to this presidential firing power, and pointed to the ruling in Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In that case in 2020, the Nine allowed Mr. Trump to fire without cause the head of that federal agency. Yet Seila Law does note that federal employees with “no policymaking or administrative authority” could be shielded from termination by federal law.No one, though, can say that the Fed chairman, Jerome Powell, is such a cipher in the executive branch. So how could the high court suggest that Mr. Powell and his colleagues on the Federal Reserve Board are shielded from the president’s prerogative to staff federal agencies with leaders of his own choosing, and accountable to him as the ultimate repository of the constitutional responsibility to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed”? Could the high court have been swayed by the Fed’s longstanding claims of “independence”? Mr. Powell’s predecessor, William McChesney Martin, in 1964 even denied that the Fed could be categorized as part of the federal government. “The courts have not had occasion to determine in which of the three branches of the U.S. Government the Board of Governors and the Federal Open Market Committee should be classified,” he told Congress.That reasoning could motivate a majority of justices to say they “disagree” with Ms. Wilcox’s and Ms. Harris’s claim that their firings “implicate the constitutionality of for-cause removal protections” for Fed board members. That’s because, as the majority says with a straight face, “The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.”One can imagine the seismic rumblings at the Hermitage Thursday as Andrew Jackson rolls over in his tomb to hear the high court — with which Old Hickory was known to tangle — seem to endorse those 19th century banking behemoths. Jackson, after all, staked his presidency on curbing the power of what he called the “corrupt” and “monstrous” Second Bank. He opposed its paper money and saw gold and silver as the only legal forms of currency.The central bank could never be “compatible with justice, with sound policy, or with the Constitution of our country,” Jackson averred when he vetoed the renewal of its charter. Yet his wisdom was ignored by Congress when it reincarnated the bank in the form of the Fed. The central bank is already angling to defy Jackson’s successor, Mr. Trump, if he envisions exercising his constitutional authority over the bank. Is the court going to side with the Fed?

Can Trump Really Not Fire the Fed Chairman?

Can Trump Really Not Fire the Fed Chairman?

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