Ex-Fed Leaders Warn Supreme Court Not to Let Trump Fire Lisa Cook

Every living former chair of the Federal Reserve Bank agrees that the Supreme Court should prevent President Donald Trump’s effort to oust Fed Governor Lisa Cook.

An amicus brief filed Thursday argued that removing Cook would “threaten independence and erode public confidence in the Fed,” and stressed the historical importance of the agency’s freedom from political considerations.

“The independence of the Federal Reserve, within the limited authority granted by Congress to achieve the goals Congress itself has set, is a critical feature of our national monetary system,” the brief said.

The brief’s signatories represented decades of expertise on economic policy, and crossed political boundaries. They included former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, who is 99 years old, as well as Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen. The brief was also signed by former Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Jack Lew, Timothy Geithner, and Hank Paulson, a Republican. Multiple former chairs of the White House Council of Economic Advisers also lent their support, including Greg Mankiw, Christina Romer, Cecilia Rouse, Jared Bernstein, Jason Furman, and Glenn Hubbard, another Republican.

Phil Gramm, a Republican who previously served as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, signed the brief as well, as did economists Ken Rogoff and John Cochrane.

Last week, Trump’s lawyer went running to the Supreme Court with a request to stay an appeals court decision keeping Cook in place. The appeals court said that Cook was likely to succeed in her statutory claim that she’d been fired without “cause,” as well as her procedural claim that she did not receive her due process prior to her removal. But attorney John Sauer argued that she was not entitled to due process, and that Trump has a sweeping discretion to fire whomever he wanted as long as he claimed it was related to their job.