Friend-of-the-court briefs seldom play important roles in Supreme Court cases. But the justices may pay particular attention to an extraordinary plea filed in today’s case.
The amicus brief was signed by every living former chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve — Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and Janet L. Yellen — along with six former Treasury secretaries and many other high-ranking former officials appointed by presidents of both parties.
Their message to the court was that allowing President Trump to immediately fire Lisa D. Cook, a Fed governor, would do grave damage to the institution’s independence, jeopardizing the credibility of the nation’s monetary policy.
“Allowing the government to remove a member of the Board of Governors for the first time in the nation’s history, while under the cloud of legal challenge, will erode public confidence in the Fed’s independence and threaten the long-term stability of our economy,” the brief said.
The question for the justices is whether they should pause a trial judge’s order allowing Ms. Cook to keep her job while her lawsuit challenging Mr. Trump’s attempt to fire her moves forward. Mr. Trump has accused Ms. Cook of mortgage fraud and said that is sufficient to require her removal for cause. Ms. Cook has denied the accusation and has not been charged with wrongdoing.
The former officials wrote that it would be a grave error to let the president fire Ms. Cook at this stage.
“Sectors that pay close attention to the Federal Reserve — including the financial markets, the public, employers and lenders — are watching the current dispute over the president’s removal of Governor Cook to judge how credible the Fed will be going forward,” the brief said.
In response, D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, wrote that the brief missed the point.
“Instead of focusing on the legal issues at the heart of this case,” he wrote, the former officials “emphasize policy arguments, touting the perceived benefits of the Federal Reserve Board’s independence in setting monetary policy. But policy preferences are not the law, and these particular preferences lack any logical limit.”
Indeed, Mr. Sauer wrote, the former officials “seemingly believe that governors should never be removable — no matter that Congress authorized the president to remove governors ‘for cause’ — lest removals ‘harm the economy.’”
Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times in 2002.
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