Most Supreme Court Justices Appear Skeptical of Trump’s Push to Oust Fed Governor Lisa Cook

The conservative majority Supreme Court, which has spent a year rewarding the Trump administration with executive power, indicated on Wednesday that granting the president unfettered control over the nation’s central bank could be a step too far.

Most of the high court’s nine judges showed deep unease over the way President Donald Trump has tried to fire Federal Reserve Board Governor Lisa Cook over unsettled allegations that she lied on mortgage application forms nearly a year before she took office in 2022. The court spent much of the hearing closely scrutinizing the White House’s justifications and stance that it couldn’t even be questioned by the judicial branch.

The stakes for independent government agencies couldn’t be higher. The Trump administration dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, ended funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and even seized the legislative branch’s Institute of Peace before reaching the central bank, whose independence from everyday politics has been long considered sacrosanct by Congress and economists who point to centuries of currency mismanagement worldwide.

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The sharpest rebuke appeared to come from Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the appointee Trump fought hardest to appoint to the Supreme Court during his first term.

“Your position that there’s no judicial review, no process required, no remedy available, very low bar for cause — that the president alone determines — I mean, that would weaken if not shatter the independence of the federal reserve that we just discussed,” Kavanaugh said.

The long-anticipated showdown at the nation’s highest court was destined from the moment Trump claimed he had the power to unilaterally fire Cook “for cause” without so much as an in-person meeting with her back in August 2025. Wednesday’s oral arguments took place in the shadow of the astonishing statement from Fed Chair Jerome Powell that the White House is engaged in a full-blown pressure campaign on the central bank to lower interest rates, claiming that the president has weaponized the Justice Department to threaten him with criminal charges as “pretexts.”

Legal and finance experts have previously noted that the poor timing of such an investigation would only undermine the Trump administration’s claims that it’s not simply trying to take over the Fed.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer, the one-time Trump personal attorney who has spent the last year at the high court defending the Trump White House, found himself in the hot seat for an hour.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett mentioned amicus briefs from economists who chimed in on the case to warn that allowing Trump to pluck out central bankers on a whim “could trigger a recession,” prompting her to ask how the high court should consider the greater public’s interest.

Sauer quickly pointed out that the stock market “went up for three days” after Trump tried to fire Cook.

“So, we’ve already had a kind of natural experiment, so to speak, about … the predictions of doom,” he said.

Barrett immediately pointed out that she’s a jurist, not an economist.

“I don’t want to be in the business of predicting what the market will do,” she said.

The legal posture of the case meant that the Supreme Court wasn’t even positioned to argue the very reasons Trump claimed Cook should no longer dictate the nation’s interest rates: an allegation that she filled out two mortgage applications just weeks apart for homes in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Atlanta, Georgia — twice claiming them as her primary home addresses.

“The American people should not have their interest rates determined by someone who was, at best, grossly negligent in obtaining favorable interest rates for herself,” Sauer said in court.

However, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked how exactly Trump came to determine that Cook was personally culpable for the misrepresentations — and whether there was a formal opportunity for her to address the allegations — prompting Sauer to claim that the central bank official could have just posted a response on social media. Justice Neil Gorsuch then jumped into the fray, wondering what a proper format would even look like — even if it’s just having a president call Cook into the White House to discuss matters in person.

“So, just a meeting across a conference table finished with, ‘You’re fired?” Gorsuch said, with some disbelief in his voice.

Sauer said the only legal precedent at the moment is that “you have to be told of what the basis is of the allegations against you and give a chance to tell your side of the story. We believe that was provided in the five-day window between the Truth Social post and removal letter.”

When Sauer called Cook’s paperwork error “quite a big mistake” — “the sort of inadvertent notation people could be indicted for” — Chief Justice John Roberts said he wasn’t so sure.

“Well, I suppose we can debate that, with how significant it is in a stack of papers you have to fill out when you’re buying real estate,” Roberts said.

When Sauer said the lower court’s decision to block Trump’s attempted firing was “unprecedented,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor tossed that word right back at him.

“One hundred and twelve years, and it’s unprecedented that any federal reserve officer has ever been removed. The unprecedented nature of this case is a part of what the president did, not what Ms. Cook did,” she said.

Sauer was also corrected when he framed the argument as an attempt to put Cook back in office — just the latest example of Trump’s claim that he could fire whomever he pleases.

“She never left. She’s still there,” Sotomayor said.

Justice Samuel Alito seemed annoyed at the entire case.

“Is there any reason this whole matter had to be handled by everybody?” he began, noting that the trial court and appellate judges haven’t even looked into the supposed fraud. “No court has ever explored those facts. Are the mortgage applications even on the record in this case?”

Sauer said he wasn’t sure, other than some screenshots appended to copies of Trump’s social media posts.

Cook’s lawyer, Paul Clement, spent much of his time fending off questions from Gorsuch and other conservative justices over the extent of the president’s authority. Barrett wondered whether low-level but embarrassing misbehavior would be enough for a president to fire a central banker “for cause.” Alito poked at Cook’s argument that pre-office conduct wouldn’t count, referencing the progressive cancel culture he dislikes by positing what would happen if there surfaced “videos of a governor praising Hitler or the Klan.”

But Roberts returned to Cook’s stance that this paperwork error was nothing more than a mistake.

“We would have liked [an] opportunity to do that and present our actual evidence, which would have substantiated that. But we also think at the end of the day, an inadvertent mistake isn’t very close to ‘for cause,’ particularly when you understand the unique nature of this institution,” Clement said.