The Supreme Court ruled on June 29 that President Trump may not fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook while her lawsuit proceeds — a 5-4 result reported almost everywhere as a rebuke of the president. [1] In the same decision, the six conservative justices handed him something much larger than they took away: at-will power to fire the heads of nearly every other independent agency in Washington. [2]

The paper has been tracking where presidential power meets the limits Congress built, most recently in its June 30 account of Senate roll calls dragging the Iran war-authority question into public view. This ruling redraws those limits, and it does so at the agencies rather than the battlefield.

What the Court did was overrule Humphrey's Executor, its unanimous 1935 decision that let Congress shield the members of independent boards from removal except for cause. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that "such protection from removal is contrary to the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution." [1] The practical effect is that the president may now remove commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board and their peers without giving a reason. The Federal Reserve alone was carved out as an exception, "unlike any other agency," because of its role setting interest rates. [1]

Cook is the exception's beneficiary, not its subject. Nominated by President Biden and the first Black woman to sit on the Fed's board, she was targeted for removal over mortgage-fraud allegations she denies. Her case, she said, "was never about mortgage documents signed years before I became a Federal Reserve governor" but "an attempt to remove me on a manufactured pretext because I refused to bow to political pressure." [3] Critics read the motive plainly: removing her would let the president install a majority on the board that sets the price of money. [1]

This is the divergence, and it inverts the headline. On X, the day reads as a loss — the Fed grab blocked, the "deep-state" central bank spared while ordinary agencies are purged. The accountability record says the opposite. A president who was told he could not fire one governor was told, in the same breath, that he may fire almost everyone else, and a ninety-one-year-old guardrail against exactly that came down to make it so. The story that says Trump lost buries the paragraph where he won.

-- SAMUEL CRANE, Washington