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    Federal Reserve governor will keep job for now despite Trump’s bid to remove her

    Lisa Cook, the US Federal Reserve governor, will keep her job for now, despite Donald Trump’s extraordinary bid to remove her from the central bank’s board with immediate effect.The US supreme court deferred action on the Department of Justice’s request to allow the president to fire Cook, at least until it hears oral arguments on the case in January.Trump has launched an unprecedented campaign to exert greater control over the Fed, publicly lambasting the US central bank over its decisions, installing a close ally on its board of governors, and attempting to fire Cook.His battle for influence has raised questions over the independence of the Fed, which for decades has steered the US economy without political interference.Trump tried to “immediately” dismiss Cook in August, citing unconfirmed allegations of mortgage fraud dating back to before she joined the Fed in 2022. She has denied wrongdoing, and argued the president has no authority to fire her.On Wednesday morning the supreme court considered his attempt to remove Cook – the first-ever bid by a president to fire a Fed official – and the administration’s complaints about judge’s order which had temporarily blocked Trump from firing her while litigation over the termination continues in a lower court.The justices declined to immediately decide a justice department request to put on hold the judge’s order, enabling Cook to stay in post for now.Abbe Lowell, of Lowell & Associates, and Norm Eisen, of the Democracy Defenders Fund, representing Cook, in a statement said: “The court’s decision rightly allows Governor Cook to continue in her role on the Federal Reserve board, and we look forward to further proceedings consistent with the court’s order.”The justice department was contacted for comment. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said the administration was looking forward to oral arguments before the court.Carl Tobias, at the University of Richmond School of Law, suggested that the decision to keep Cook in place, and the court’s announcement that it would hear oral arguments on the merits of the case in January, were “good signs for both sides”.“It does protect the independence of the Fed, at least in the short term,” Tobias told the Guardian. “The one big question is: even if they have arguments in January, when will they issue the ruling? That could come early, because I expect the government will ask them to expedite everything, but it could be as late as June.”The court’s decision to maintain the status quo in the short term should allow markets to “settle down” and mitigate the uncertainty around the Fed, he added.In creating the Federal Reserve in 1913, Congress passed a law called the Federal Reserve Act that included provisions to shield the central bank from political interference, requiring governors to be removed by a president only “for cause”, though the law does not define the term nor establish procedures for removal. The law has never been tested in court.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJia Cobb, a Washington-based US district judge, on 9 September ruled that Trump’s claims that Cook committed mortgage fraud before taking office, which Cook denies, were probably not sufficient grounds for removal under the Federal Reserve Act.Cook, the first Black woman to serve as a Fed governor, sued Trump in August after the president announced he would remove her. Cook has said the claims made by Trump against her did not give the president the legal authority to remove her and were a pretext to fire her because of her monetary policy stance.Trump has made no secret of his plans to influence the Fed, publicly describing plans to swiftly build “a majority” on its interest-rate setting committee of policymakers.He has repeatedly broken with precedent to demand rate cuts, and attack senior Fed officials, including its chair, Jerome Powell, when they repeatedly defied these calls.Powell has repeatedly stressed he is “strongly committed” to maintaining the Fed’s independence. His term as chair is due to end next year. The Trump administration has been drawing up plans to appoint a successor.Reuters contributed reporting More

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    US supreme court allows Trump to withhold nearly $5bn in foreign aid

    The supreme court on Friday extended an order that allows Donald Trump’s administration to keep frozen nearly $5bn in foreign aid, handing him another victory in a dispute over presidential power.The court acted on the Republican administration’s emergency appeal in a case involving billions of dollars in congressionally approved aid. Trump said last month that he would not spend the money, invoking disputed authority that was last used by a president roughly 50 years ago.The justice department sought the supreme court’s intervention after US district judge Amir Ali ruled that Trump’s action was likely illegal and that Congress would have to approve the decision to withhold the funding.The federal appeals court in Washington declined to put Ali’s ruling on hold, but John Roberts, the chief justice, temporarily blocked it on 9 September. The full court indefinitely extended Roberts’ order.The court has previously cleared the way for the Trump administration to strip legal protections from hundreds of thousands of migrants, fire thousands of federal employees, oust transgender members of the military and remove the heads of independent government agencies.The legal victories, while not final rulings, all have come through emergency appeals, used sparingly under previous presidencies, to fast-track cases to the supreme court, where decisions are often handed down with no explanation.Trump told House speaker Mike Johnson in a 28 August letter that he would not spend $4.9bn in congressionally approved foreign aid, effectively cutting the budget without going through the legislative branch.He used what’s known as a pocket rescission. That’s a rarely used maneuver when a president submits a request to Congress toward the end of a current budget year to not spend the approved money. The late notice essentially flips the script. Under federal law,Congress has to approve the rescission within 45 days or the money must be spent. But the budget year will end before the 45-day window closes, and in this situation the White House is asserting that congressional inaction allows it to not spend the money.The Trump administration has made deep reductions to foreign aid one of its hallmark policies, despite the relatively meager savings relative to the deficit and possible damage to America’s reputation abroad as people lose access to food supplies and development programs.Justice department lawyers told a federal judge last month that another $6.5bn in aid that had been subject to the freeze would be spent before the end of the fiscal year next Tuesday. More

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    Supreme court lets Trump fire FTC commissioner for now and will hear arguments later

    The US supreme court on Monday let Donald Trump fire a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, for now, while agreeing to hear arguments in the case in December, setting up a major test of presidential power over government agencies designed by Congress to be independent.The court granted a justice department request to block a judge’s order that had shielded Rebecca Slaughter, who sued to challenge Trump’s action, from being dismissed from the consumer protection and antitrust agency before her term expires in 2029.The supreme court said it will hear arguments in the case, which could lead to the justices overruling a landmark 90-year-old precedent upholding job protections put in place by Congress to give the heads of certain federal agencies a degree of independence from presidential control.The court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Its three liberal justices dissented from Monday’s order letting Trump remove Slaughter for now.John Roberts, the chief justice, on 8 September had paused an order from Loren AliKhan, a Washington-based US district judge – – a move that allowed Trump to keep Slaughter out of her post – to give the court more time to consider how to respond to the justice department’s request.Federal law permits a president to remove FTC commissioners only for cause – such as inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office – but not for policy differences. Similar protections cover officials at other independent agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board.Slaughter was one of two Democratic commissioners who Trump moved to fire in March. The firings drew sharp criticism from Democratic senators and antimonopoly groups concerned that the move was designed to eliminate opposition within the agency to big corporations.AliKhan in July blocked Trump’s firing of Slaughter, rejecting the Trump administration’s argument that the tenure protections unlawfully encroach on presidential power. The US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit on 2 September in a 2-1 decision kept the judge’s ruling in place.The supreme court did not set a precise date for the arguments scheduled for December.The lower courts ruled that the statutory protections shielding FTC members from being removed without cause conform with the US constitution in light of a 1935 supreme court precedent in a case called Humphrey’s Executor v United States. In that case, the court ruled that a president lacks unfettered power to remove FTC commissioners, faulting Franklin Roosevelt’s firing of an FTC commissioner for policy differences.The Trump administration in its supreme court filing in Slaughter’s case argued that “the modern FTC exercises far more substantial powers than the 1935 FTC”, and thus its members can be fired at will by the president.Lawyers for Slaughter in court papers pushed back against that contention, arguing that the FTC’s development over the decades is “a story of continuity, not transformation”. More

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    Trump’s take on a court decision on tariffs is bonkers – even for him | Steven Greenhouse

    Just hours after an appeals court ruled that it was illegal for Donald Trump to impose his unpopular across-the-board tariffs on dozens of countries, he posted a frantic, over-the-top rant that declared: “If allowed to stand, this Decision would literally destroy the United States of America.”So here the president of the United States was asserting that if the courts torpedoed his tariffs, then the US, the most powerful nation on earth, would be destroyed, would “literally” be kaput. Trump seemed to suggest that court rulings that blocked his beloved tariffs would have the destructive power of, say, 100 hydrogen bombs.Call me naive, but I never cease to be amazed when Trump says such egregiously false and ludicrous things. OK, I sometimes forget that he’s the guy who said that noise from wind turbines causes cancer. After narrowly winning the presidency a second time notwithstanding the 30,573 Trump lies, falsehoods and misleading claims in his first term, Trump evidently thinks he can say anything, no matter how false or foolish, and get away with it. As part of his tariff fight, Trump also blurted this absurdity: if the courts don’t uphold his tariffs, “we would become a Third World Nation.”Trump’s statement that ending tariffs will destroy the US is totally bonkers because the US became the world’s richest nation and has largely prospered for nearly 250 years (despite occasional slumps) before Trump imposed his “Liberation Day” tariffs in April. In the months before then, the US had solid GDP growth, low unemployment and declining inflation – the Economist magazine even called the US economy “the envy of the world”. But now Trump says that if the courts give a thumbs down to his favorite plaything – I mean weapon – to bang other countries over the head with, it would end the US. Even Ramesh Ponnuru, editor of the conservative National Review, called that “lunatic stuff”.The truth is that if the courts block Trump’s across-the-board tariffs, that would be good news for the US economy. It would prevent Trump’s tariffs from further pushing up inflation and slowing economic growth. By giving a thumbs down to Trump’s tariffs, the courts might be doing him a huge economic and political favor because his tariffs, and the inflation they are fueling, have been dragging his dismal approval ratings even lower.On 29 August, the US court of appeals for the federal circuit in Washington DC ruled that Trump overstepped his authority when he invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose his Liberation Day tariffs. The court said that act doesn’t give presidents the authority to slap sweeping tariffs on other countries. Trump has appealed the ruling to the supreme court, which might rule on the tariffs this fall.The court of appeals repeatedly noted that the constitution gives Congress, not presidents, the power to impose tariffs. It further noted that the Emergency Act doesn’t mention the word “tariffs” even once among the tools the act authorizes presidents to use to deal with emergency trade problems. (That appellate ruling overturned the bulk of Trump’s tariffs: the blanket 10% to 50% tariffs on exports from more than 70 countries. The court didn’t rule on Trump’s product-specific tariffs on steel, aluminum and auto parts.)As part of his conniptions over the appeals court ruling, Trump also warned of fiscal disaster, complaining that the US would lose hundreds of billions of dollars if his tariffs were halted. But Trump conveniently forgets that it’s embattled US consumers who will be paying most of those hundreds of billions as they pay Trump’s tariffs, essentially import taxes on furniture, cars, coffee, electronics and other foreign goods.In using his hysterical language, Trump evidently had one audience in mind: the supreme court’s six conservative justices who have repeatedly ruled his way. Trump’s goal is evidently to scare the bejesus out of those justices – he hopes that by shrieking “You’ll Destroy the Country If You Rule Against Me,” that will persuade them to overturn the appellate court’s decision and uphold his tariffs. (The appellate court let the tariffs remain in force to allow time for appeal.)So far in his second term, Trump has a remarkable batting average with the supreme court’s six rightwing justices, who seem astonishingly subservient and supine vis-a-vis the most authoritarian, power-grabbing president in US history. The justices have used their emergency docket to grant Trump administration requests 18 times in a row, often vacating injunctions that lower courts put in place to stop what they saw as Trump’s rampant lawlessness. In repeatedly siding with Trump, the supreme court has scrapped lower court injunctions in several highly controversial cases, provisionally letting Trump fire the chair of the National Labor Relations Board, gut the federal Department of Education, and give Doge – with its staff of twentysomethings – access to the highly private social security information of hundreds of millions of Americans.Trump is no doubt worried that the supreme court, though submissive so far, will overturn his tariffs. Many conservative and libertarian scholars and lawyers oppose his tariffs as both harmful and illegal. Not only do they dislike the tariffs for pushing up inflation and disrupting global supply chains, but they see Trump’s tariffs as anti-free market and mucking up the US and world economies.When Trump announced his Liberation Day tariffs, he invoked a national emergency, saying the US trade deficit and other countries’ tariffs were urgent problems undermining the US economy. Admittedly the trade deficit and other countries’ tariffs are a problem, but in no way do they constitute a national emergency, especially since the US economy was seen as “the envy of the world” before Trump went hog wild with his tariffs. (There’s no denying that the flood of imports from China and other low-wage nations badly damaged many communities in America’s industrial heartland two and three decades ago.) Wouldn’t it be great if, in this tariff litigation, the supreme court stood up to Trump and issued a candid ruling that told him: “Sorry, Mr President, your supposed national emergency is hogwash, a pretext for you to pursue your destructive tariff obsession”?The supreme court’s justices shouldn’t let themselves be cowed, bullied or fooled by Trump’s talk that the nation will be destroyed if they nix his tariffs. Trump is like the boy who cried wolf, forever crying catastrophe if he doesn’t get his way. It’s time for the court and the nation to wise up to Trump’s lies, hype and shenanigans.Virtually every non-Trumpian economist agrees that Trump’s tariffs have hurt the US by increasing inflation, undermining GDP growth, creating huge headaches for corporations and seriously damaging the US’s relations with other nations. The justices shouldn’t buy Trump’s calamitous warnings that if they overturn his tariffs, the world will end.If the justices declare his tariffs illegal, it certainly won’t be a “disaster” for the US, as Trump has claimed. But it might be a disaster for Trump’s ego and for his dangerous dream of having an authoritarian presidency wholly unchecked by the other branches of government.If the supreme court rules against Trump’s tariffs, let’s hope that will serve as a much-needed first step to the court’s developing the backbone to rule many times more against Trump’s authoritarian and lawless actions.

    Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labour and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues More

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    US supreme court to decide on legality of Trump’s sweeping global tariffs

    The US supreme court agreed on Tuesday to decide the legality of Donald Trump’s sweeping global tariffs, setting up a major test of one of the Republican president’s boldest assertions of executive power that has been central to his economic and trade agenda.The justices took up the justice department’s appeal of a lower court’s ruling that Trump overstepped his authority in imposing most of his tariffs under a federal law meant for emergencies. The court swiftly acted after the administration last week asked it to review the case, which involves trillions of dollars in customs duties over the next decade.The court, which begins its next nine-month term on 6 October, placed the case on a fast track, scheduling oral arguments for the first week of November.The justices also agreed to hear a separate challenge to Trump’s tariffs brought by a family-owned toy company, Learning Resources.The US court of appeals for the federal circuit in Washington ruled on 29 August that Trump overreached in invoking a 1977 law known as the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose the tariffs, undercutting a major priority for the president in his second term. The tariffs, however, remain in effect during the appeal to the supreme court.The levies are part of a trade war instigated by Trump since he returned to the presidency in January that has alienated trading partners, increased volatility in financial markets and fueled global economic uncertainty.Trump has made tariffs a key foreign policy tool, using them to renegotiate trade deals, extract concessions and exert political pressure on other countries.Trump in April invoked the 1977 law in imposing tariffs on goods imported from individual countries to address trade deficits, as well as separate tariffs announced in February as economic leverage on China, Canada and Mexico to curb the trafficking of fentanyl and illicit drugs into the US.The law gives the president power to deal with “an unusual and extraordinary threat” amid a national emergency. It historically had been used for imposing sanctions on enemies or freezing their assets. Prior to Trump, the law had never been used to impose tariffs.Trump’s Department of Justice has argued that the law allows tariffs under emergency provisions that authorize a president to “regulate” imports.
    “The stakes in this case could not be higher,” the justice department said in a filing. Denying Trump‘s tariff power “would expose our nation to trade retaliation without effective defenses and thrust America back to the brink of economic catastrophe”, it added.Trump has said that if he loses the case the US might have to unwind trade deals, causing the country to “suffer so greatly”.The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported in August that the increased duties on imports from foreign countries could reduce the US national deficit by $4tn over the next decade. More

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    Supreme court lifts restrictions on Los Angeles immigration raids in win for Trump

    Federal agents can resume sweeping immigration operations in Los Angeles after the US supreme court lifted an order barring the Donald Trump administration from stopping people solely based on their race, language or job.The court ruled in favor of Trump’s administration, granting a stay against a restraining order from another judge that found “roving patrols” of immigration agents were conducting indiscriminate arrests in LA. The ruling from the conservative majority is a win for the administration in its ongoing effort to enact mass deportations.US district judge Maame E Frimpong in Los Angeles had found a “mountain of evidence” that enforcement tactics were violating the constitution. The plaintiffs, who said the administration’s approach amounted to “blatant racial profiling”, included US citizens swept up in immigration stops. An appeals court had left Frimpong’s ruling in place.But the Trump administration argued the order wrongly restricted agents carrying out its widespread crackdown on illegal immigration.The supreme court’s 6-3 decision comes as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents also step up enforcement in Washington amid Trump’s unprecedented federal takeover of the capital city’s law enforcement and deployment of the national guard.The lawsuit will now continue to unfold in California. It was filed by immigrant advocacy groups that accused Trump’s administration of systematically targeting brown-skinned people during a crackdown on illegal immigration in the Los Angeles area.The Trump administration has made California a center of its deportation campaign, sending federal agents near schools and workplaces and Home Depot stores. The large show of federal agents – along with the deployment of the military – has left southern California communities in fear.In its order granting the stay, the court majority wrote that the government sometimes makes stops to check the immigration status of people who work jobs in landscaping or construction, among others “that often do not require paperwork and are therefore attractive to illegal immigrants; and who do not speak much if any English”.“Immigration stops based on reasonable suspicion of illegal presence have been an important component of US immigration enforcement for decades, across several presidential administrations,” the decision states.In a stinging dissent joined by her two liberal colleagues, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote: “Countless people in the Los Angeles area have been grabbed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents, and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor. Today, the Court needlessly subjects countless more to these exact same indignities.”Department of Homeland Security attorneys have said immigration officers target people based on illegal presence in the US, not skin color, race or ethnicity. Even so, the justice department argued that the order wrongly restricted the factors that Ice agents can use when deciding who to stop.The Los Angeles region has been a battleground for the Trump administration after its hardline immigration strategy spurred protests and the deployment of the national guard and the marines. The number of immigration raids in the Los Angeles area appeared to slow shortly after Frimpong’s order came down in July, but recently they have become more frequent again, including an operation in which agents jumped out of the back of a rented box truck and made arrests at an LA Home Depot store.The supreme court decision was condemned by LA mayor Karen Bass, who said it “isn’t just an attack on the people of Los Angeles, this is an attack on every person in every city in this country.“I want the entire nation to hear me when I say this isn’t just an attack on the people of Los Angeles, this is an attack on every person in every city in this country. Today’s ruling is not only dangerous – it’s un-American and threatens the fabric of personal freedom in the United States of America.”The plaintiffs argued that her order only prevents federal agents from making stops without reasonable suspicion, something that aligns with the constitution and supreme court precedent.“Numerous US citizens and others who are lawfully present in this country have been subjected to significant intrusions on their liberty,” the plaintiffs’ attorneys wrote. “Many have been physically injured; at least two were taken to a holding facility.”The Trump administration said the order is too restrictive, “threatening agents with sanctions if the court disbelieves that they relied on additional factors in making any particular stop”.D John Sauer, the solicitor general, also argued the order can’t stand under the high court’s recent decision restricting universal injunctions, though the plaintiffs disagreed.The order from Frimpong, who was nominated by Joe Biden, barred authorities from using factors such as apparent race or ethnicity, speaking Spanish or English with an accent, presence at a location such as a tow yard or car wash, or someone’s occupation as the only basis for reasonable suspicion for detention. It’s covered a combined population of nearly 20 million people, nearly half of whom identify as Hispanic or Latino.Plaintiffs included three detained immigrants and two US citizens. One of the citizens was Los Angeles resident Brian Gavidia, who was shown in a 13 June video being seized by federal agents as he yelled: “I was born here in the States. East LA, bro!”Gavidia was released about 20 minutes later after showing agents his identification, as was another citizen stopped at a car wash, according to the lawsuit. More

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    Amy Coney Barrett says supreme court rulings are ‘not opinion polls’

    US supreme court rulings are “not just an opinion poll” of its nine judges’ beliefs, conservative Amy Coney Barrett says, as she and her colleagues weigh a request to overturn the legalization of same-sex marriage.“The court should not be imposing its own values on the American people,” Barrett remarked in a preview of an interview airing on the latest episode of CBS News Sunday Morning. “That’s for the democratic process.”Barrett delivered her comments in what was billed as her first television interview since she joined the supreme court in 2020 – a conversation with the Sunday Morning host Norah O’Donnell meant to promote her new book, Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution.In the book, set for publication on 9 September, Barrett asserted her belief that the June 2022 ruling that struck down abortion rights nationally “respected the choice” of Americans. She wrote that she believed the 7-2 Roe v Wade ruling that established those federal abortion rights had “usurped the will of the American people”, as put by CNN, which ran an excerpt of the book a week before its release date.Yet more than 60% of Americans believed abortion should be legal in all or most cases, a May 2024 poll found. That was only four points higher than in 2021, a year before Barrett joined four other ultraconservatives in removing national abortion access protections, clearing the way for numerous states to quickly ban or severely restrict the procedure.Meanwhile, a May 2025 Gallup poll found 68% support for legal same-sex marriage. Nonetheless, Barrett and her colleagues have been asked to overturn the 2015 Obergefell v Hodges supreme court ruling that recognized same-sex marriage as a constitutional right.The former Kentucky county court clerk Kim Davis, who stopped issuing marriage licenses in the aftermath of the Obergefell decision, made the request.In a recent interview with the Raging Moderates political podcast co-host Jessica Tarlov the former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton predicted the supreme court “will do to gay marriage what they did to abortion”.“They will send it back to the states,” Clinton, who Donald Trump defeated in 2016 to win the first of his two presidencies, said to Tarlov.When O’Donnell mentioned Clinton’s prediction to Barrett, the justice replied: “People who criticize the court or who are outside say a lot of different things.“The point that I make in the book is that we have to tune those things out.”Barrett’s nomination and confirmation were rushed through the US Senate by the Republican majority leader at the time, Mitch McConnell, within weeks of the death of the veteran liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.It gave Trump his third supreme court pick along with a 6-3 conservative supermajority that has consistently ruled in his favor for his second presidency, which began in January, including landmark decisions expanding Oval Office powers.Barrett’s confirmation was just eight days before the November 2020 election that Trump lost to Joe Biden. It contrasted sharply with McConnell’s handling of the aftermath of the death of another justice, the conservative Antonin Scalia, in February 2016. McConnell back then touted his successful stalling of Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, for almost a year, until Trump took office for his first presidency and replaced Scalia with Neil Gorsuch in April 2017.CNN reported that references to Trump in Barrett’s book – for which she is said to have been paid a $2m advance – were “only in passing”.O’Donnell pointed out to Barrett that in her book the justice wrote that “the rights to marry, engage in sexual intimacy, use birth control and raise children are fundamental, but the rights to do business, commit suicide and obtain abortion are not”.“I want Americans to understand the law – and that it’s not just an opinion poll about whether the supreme court thinks something is good or … bad,” Barrett said. “What the court is trying to do is see what the American people have decided.” More