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WILL THE COURT RULE FOR TRUMP OR FOR WALL STREET?  
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Harold Meyerson
December 11, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ As the Supreme Court now considers whether Trump can take over the
Federal Reserve, we lose either way. In what may be its most difficult
challenge: To whom does it owe its ultimate submission and greatest
obeisance: Donald Trump, or Wall Street? _

Illustration credit: Douglas Rissing/iStock // The American Prospect,


 

Last Monday, the Court held oral arguments
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in a case concerning Trump’s firing of a member of the Federal Trade
Commission for no reason other than his desire to install his own
person in her place. For the Court to rule in Trump’s favor, it
would have to overturn the 90-year-old Court decision in _Humphrey’s
Executor_, which held that Congress had established regulatory
commissions with fixed terms for commissioners that didn’t coincide
with presidential terms, so that their rulings would be insulated from
direct political pressures and thus better serve, in a disinterested
way, the public’s interests. In its 1935 decision, the Court ruled
that President Franklin Roosevelt couldn’t fire a commission member
without establishing that member’s misconduct, and that has remained
the law until now.

In its preliminary rulings on commission members fired by Trump since
he began his second term, however, the Court upheld those firings and
hinted that when a full-blown case came before it, as it did on
Monday, it would strike down _Humphrey’s Executor_. That would
comport with the Republican justices’ pattern of generally vesting
more power in the presidency and specifically letting Trump run amok,
as it did in its ruling last year holding that a president could not
be held accountable for any actions he (or she) took in an official
capacity, save by congressional impeachment. That went against the
words inscribed on the Court itself—“Equal Justice Under
Law”—but the Court’s push for a unitary executive, which under
Trump has come close to meaning autocratic rule, clearly mattered more
than that “equal justice” nonsense, and certainly more than all
those federal laws, dating back to the late 19th century, establishing
commissions to protect small businesses, workers, consumers, and
people who breathe air and drink water.

However, in the course of Monday’s session, Justice Brett Kavanaugh
raised an issue that doubtless troubled his fellow Republicans: If
they struck down _Humphrey’s Executor_, how could they preserve the
one institution that works in the interest of America’s banks, Wall
Street, and generally, the rich: the Federal Reserve? But for the
brief interlude when liberals, under the leadership of Chief Justice
Earl Warren, dominated the Court, that body has always been the
defender of big business interests. In that sense, the most
paradigmatic decisions the Court has ever rendered were those in which
it extended the rights that citizens had won under the 14th Amendment
to the corporations and cartels that arose after the Civil War, while
denying those rights to the very Black Americans that the 14th
Amendment was written to protect.

It’s the Fed that holds ready cash on tap for big banks if they get
in trouble, that can regulate those banks or block regulations on
them, and that banks, corporations, bondholders, and the rich count on
to deter inflation (which can devalue their holdings), chiefly by
raising interest rates and unemployment rates. No governmental body
has done more to block full employment, thereby squelching the
interests of working-class Americans while enhancing the income and
wealth of the wealthy. There have been times when even _Republican_
presidents, anxious about the public’s view of their economic
stewardship, have wanted the Fed to lower interest rates—Nixon is on
that list, and Trump most surely is as well—but a staunch
independent Fed, free from presidential tinkering thanks to
_Humphrey’s Executor_, can defend the rich even from them.

On Monday, Kavanaugh asked the attorney from Trump’s Justice
Department, who was arguing in favor of striking _Humphrey’s_ down,
to find a way that the Court could strike down regulatory commissions
but leave the Fed intact. The best that attorney—Solicitor General
D. John Sauer—could do was answer that firing the Fed’s board
members would “raise their own set of unique distinct issues.”
What those issues might be, other than unique and distinct, he
declined to say.

Let it not be said that in this moment of judicial uncertainty I was
reluctant to help out. So let me suggest some ways in which the Fed
and its governors are unique and distinct from other regulatory boards
and their commissioners. The Federal Trade Commission protects small
businesses and consumers from oligopolistic pricing and other abuses
of big businesses. The Securities and Exchange Commission protects
investors and the public from scams and financial manipulation. The
National Labor Relations Board oversees workers’ rights to
collective bargaining. The Consumer Product Safety Commission
investigates new products and can publicize and, if need be, ban the
sale of those that are unsafe. The Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau protects bank depositors and the public generally against the
exploitative practices of financial institutions. These, and a host of
other such regulatory bodies, may see their powers effectively
diminished by hostile administrations or by court rulings in favor of
the businesses they regulate, but there’s no question that Congress
established them to protect, in the broadest sense, the public
interest.

The mission of the Fed, by contrast, has always been to protect the
public interest _as primarily defined as protecting capital over
labor_. To be sure, in its ability to arrest financial panics, the Fed
can serve, and has served, the interest of the nation at large. But it
can also elevate, and has elevated, the interests of the rich over
everyone else. In the early 1980s, under the leadership of Paul
Volcker, the Fed raised interest rates to the point that people were
no longer buying cars. That brought down the inflation that was
reducing the value of the bonds in which the rich had invested, but it
also caused the closure of thousands of factories, beginning the
hollowing out of American manufacturing and turning our industrial
states into the Rust Belt. Just as the subsequent offshoring of
industry had the effect of reducing Americans’ income, so did the
Fed’s long-term war against a full-employment economy, in which
workers can gain the power to bargain for higher wages.

When F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed that “the rich are different
from you and me,” his friend Ernest Hemingway replied, “Yes, they
have more money.” _That_ is what differentiates the Fed’s
clientele, as it were, from the clientele of the other regulatory
agencies. It may present a challenge to the six Court Republicans to
create a doctrine that propounds a legal basis for that distinction,
and some of them may be so Trump-smitten that they’re willing to
give over the Fed to Trump’s every whim anyway. Still, Wall Street
is counting on them to keep the Fed beholden to Wall Street rather
than any president.

Hence, the Court’s conundrum. And whichever way they rule—in favor
of even more expansive and unchallengeable presidential power, or in
favor of keeping the Fed as is—we lose.

_[HAROLD MEYERSON is editor at large of The American Prospect. __MORE
BY HAROLD MEYERSON_ [[link removed]]_]_

_Read the original article at __Prospect.org_
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_Used with the permission. © __The American Prospect_
[[link removed]]_, __Prospect.org, 2025_
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* Supreme Court
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* federal reserve
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* Executive powers
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* Donald Trump
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* Economic Policy
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* financial industry
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* Federal Trade Commission
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* Wall Street
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* conservatism
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* SCOTUS
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* independent commissions
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* inflation
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* unemployment
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* Law & Justice
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* money
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* Politics & Power
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* republicans
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* Republican Party
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* GOP
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