Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts - Preview: Fed Up
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3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 21 January 2026
⏱️ 9 minutes
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Summary
In this member-exclusive episode, co-hosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discuss the Supreme Court’s fact-free foray into Trump v. Cook, a case that economists warn could crater the economy. President Donald Trump spent the first weeks of his second stint in the White House firing a lot of people from government agencies. For the most part, the High Court’s conservative justices let it slide, in line with their general “he’s the President, let him do it” posture. But Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook was different. In August, Trump fired off a post on Truth Social, then sacked Cook a few days later, leaving a huge question mark hanging over the independence of the Fed. Turns out, that’s a very big deal for anyone who wants to avoid hyperinflation and economic disaster. During Wednesday’s arguments, it was clear that even Trump’s hand-picked justices felt as though they would like to avoid such catastrophes. What ensued was more about feelings, fear, and frustration than law, but that may be the best we can hope for.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, and welcome to a special bonus episode of Amicus Slate's podcast about the courts and the law. |
| 0:10.3 | I'm Dahlia Lithwick. |
| 0:11.4 | And I'm Mark Joseph Stern. |
| 0:12.7 | And we are popping up with this extra midweek episode because while President Donald Trump was wrapping up his rambling and largely incoherent |
| 0:24.1 | impersonation of Tony Soprano in Davos, the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court were |
| 0:30.7 | settling in to hear two hours of oral arguments over President Trump's efforts to remove |
| 0:36.8 | Lisa Cook, a federal reserve governor, |
| 0:39.8 | by way of a truth social post last August, alleging that she'd committed mortgage fraud. |
| 0:45.5 | Again, mortgage fraud. |
| 0:47.1 | The D.C. Circuit had actually stayed that effort at removal. |
| 0:50.2 | The case hurtled up to the high court on the shadow docket without any real record, without any real facts, without much guidance other than the president's feelings. |
| 1:01.0 | And so Solicitor General John Sauer used Wednesday morning's arguments to claim that presidential removal decisions, even at the Fed, are virtually unreviewable, while former solicitor general |
| 1:12.8 | Paul Clement, representing Lisa Cook, argued that this had all happened illegally and |
| 1:17.4 | sloppily and at a minimum far too fast, insisting that this was just not a good way to do law. |
| 1:23.6 | So Mark and I have convened this special session of the amicus plus smokeless cigar bar in order to try to discern what precisely a high court is to do without facts law, articulable harms to the president, in a case where they might not even be able to craft a remedy and might have no authority to intervene at all. |
| 1:45.7 | It is high court Calvin Ball, but this time it's played with neither a ball nor, it seems, a |
| 1:52.5 | Calvin. So, hi there, Mark. Hi again, Dahlia. And I wonder if you could just start by reminding |
| 1:58.3 | us how we got here and how it is that Donald Trump pushed the |
| 2:02.6 | Supreme Court into a place where I think it was demonstrably clear from arguments. They really did not |
| 2:08.8 | want to be. So when Donald Trump went back to the White House last January, he very quickly |
| 2:16.5 | started firing a bunch of people who he could not |
| 2:19.0 | legally fire people on the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, |
... |
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