Court Term Reflects Reagan, Not Trump, Priorities

Wanna turn now to somebody who's been to a Washington dinner party or two and is probably in tune to the conversation that Matthew brought up at the start of that interview. That's Greg Stohr.

He covers the supreme court for us here, at Bloomberg News. Greg, let me go right there if if I could. How much is this something that folks in Washington, lawyers and others, are are talking about?

How do you think of that in light of the way that the president reacts to the decisions that we saw in the last few weeks of the court's term? So good morning to you both. Thanks for exaggerating my my social life, David.

Not at all. Not at all. You know, it has been a topic, a big topic throughout this Trump term. We have seen both the president and other administration officials

talking about the possibility of ignoring the courts. Now for the most part, that has happened with the lower courts so far. There has not been a case of outright defiance of the Supreme Court.

And in fact, with all these decisions of the this term, most of which went Trump's way, some of which went against him, we haven't seen any outright defiance. And so I suppose, you know, in this very difficult time for this nation with so much division, perhaps we

we can say that's a good sign that we didn't see outright defiance. President Trump does really have an affinity for Andrew Jackson, but, you're right so far. I do wanna ask you about these two cases we

were talking to in the lead up to these decisions, and that is the slaughter case and the Cook case. Because when we were speaking earlier, you said that they would probably have to be issued together because they were similar, but it looks like based on oral arguments, and

this is where it ended up, the court would go one way with one and one way with the other. So why can you talk to us about whether you think this the court in their arguments successfully skirted that, complication and managed to lay out justifications for why?

In one case, they expanded presidential power and said the president can fire the head of the FTC. In another case said, well, not quite yet on Lisa Cook, and here's why. Yeah.

Well, the the biggest thing is probably just that the court said the Fed is different. And to put a little more on that, the Fed is different because of its role in setting monetary policy and the the history and the tradition of the institution.

Now the court kind of skirted some questions like, well, what about the functions of the Fed that are a lot like other executive branch agencies, the regulation of banks, for example? But the court did did, you know, draw a line

that says the Fed is not an institution where the president can fire people for any reason. Now having said that, when we got into the issue of, okay, Donald Trump says he has a reason for firing Lisa Cook, the the alleged mortgage fraud that she

denies, the court essentially said, okay. We're gonna protect the Fed to some degree for the time being. There's a lot of tough questions in here. There's questions about what kind of process she is entitled

to before the president does that, and there's definitely a lot of questions about what is enough to constitute cause. That is enough reasons the president could fire her. Not at all clear which way it will come out ultimately in this case.

You've heard a new piece kind of looking at the takeaways from from this last term, and there's a line that stood out to me. That's president Trump has built the supreme court supermajority, but it was the Reagan revolution that prevailed during the just