In Trump v. Cook, the Court considers the hugely important question of whether the Fed is (effectively) independent of the President. Although the President does not assert the power to dismiss board members at will, he does argue for effectively the same result: he contends that there is no process due to fired board members, and that, though cause is required to fire a member, the Court cannot review the asserted cause. This is essentially in-effect at-will.
Though the Court is keen on executive power and the unitary executive theory, observers have long been skeptical that the Court would allow the President to breach the independence of the Federal Reserve. There may be distinctions to draw between the Fed and other agencies, but the most notable one of course is that it plays such a key role in our economy and financial markets. It is hard to see the Federal Reserve playing a healthy role in our markets without independence; and harder still (impossible?) to see it playing that role if subjected to the whims of the current President. Trump’s on-going feud with Powell, including threats by the DOJ only about a week before the Cook oral argument, must have made those concerns more salient in the minds of the justices.
In terms of procedural posture, the lower court issued a preliminary injunction so that Cook would remain in her job while the case proceeds. The Court is considering an appeal to that order. Betting markets never thought the odds of her being ousted much exceeded one-out-of-three. Most observers thought argument went poorly for Trump, and the betting markets briefly predicted that she would keep her job with 90 percent confidence. It is now down to about 80 percent.
The justice bot model thinks it is somewhat more likely than the betting markets that the Court lets her be ousted—it suggests about a 55 percent chance that Trump wins. That said, it has a fair amount of uncertainty about this prediction, and the prediction could easily read as a 6-3 vote to affirm. The bot prediction may be wrong, but it would not be a "confident" wrong.
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