00:00Tomorrow, we will hopefully get word on more opinions from the Supreme Court.
00:03Key decisions are still on the docket, including birthright citizenship and President Trump's attempt to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa
00:10Cook.
00:11Joining us now is Bloomberg Supreme Court reporter Greg Storr, who's been incredibly busy filing numerous reports on all the
00:16decisions we have got handed down, waiting on these, of course.
00:19Let's take them in kind, if we could, and let's start with that Lisa Cook decision.
00:22This is about whether the president can do this temporarily, but, of course, the ramifications extend far beyond that, Greg.
00:27Greg, get us up to speed on sort of where things stand and how the arguments in that case kind
00:31of color what you expect to happen when that is handed down.
00:34Yeah. Good morning, David and Christina.
00:37This is a huge case for the independence of the Federal Reserve.
00:41The president has tried to fire Lisa Cook, a Fed governor, for alleged mortgage fraud.
00:47She denies the allegation.
00:49And the question before the Supreme Court, as you said, is just whether he can oust her while that legal
00:54fight goes forward.
00:55The arguments back in January did not go especially well for the president.
00:59There was certainly a lot of skepticism that he should be allowed to remove her before she even had a
01:06chance to defend herself, defend herself against the allegations and to say that he's overstepping his authority.
01:12The court was also, though, pretty wary of what this decision might mean down the road for other cases.
01:19There's concern about saying too much about what power the president does have to fire somebody.
01:25Federal law says that he can fire somebody for cause.
01:28Exactly what that means has not been spelled out.
01:32So we may get a relatively narrow decision that keeps her in office but doesn't answer every single question.
01:38This is also tied to another case that we're waiting for, which is the FTC commissioner, Slaughter v. Trump, because
01:46it's a different federal agency and it's likely the court is going to support the president in that one.
01:53But based on the arguments and what we're hearing from even some of the conservative justices, they seem very leery
01:59of the president's power to get rid of Cook.
02:02So talk to us about the difference in this case and how you think the court might try to split
02:06those different arguments.
02:07Right. So that case is known as Slaughter, has to be named after a Democratic member of the Federal Trade
02:13Commission.
02:14So it goes back to the 1930s.
02:17The Supreme Court at that point said Congress can set up independent federal agencies and say the leaders of them,
02:25the commissioners of the FTC, for example, can't be removed unless the president has a good reason like misconduct.
02:31And that laid the legal groundwork for the administrative state that we all came to know.
02:37And the Supreme Court has been chipping away at that.
02:40And what the court could do this coming week is say we're going to overturn that big 1935 precedent and
02:46say the president can fire the heads of those agencies for any reason because they they have executive powers.
02:54And the executive power under the Constitution belongs to the president.
02:58So he must be able to fire them whenever they're not adhering to his policy preferences.
03:03Now, important note, the Supreme Court has suggested earlier that the Fed is not part of that discussion, that the
03:09Fed is different and that whatever it does in this case involving the Federal Trade Commission is not going to
03:14affect the Fed.
03:15And that's why the Lisa Cook case matters, because there the president says it's not just for any reason.
03:19I think she has done something wrong and that's why I'm firing her.
03:24So that's a different category of case.
03:26Greg, the other big one that we're waiting for is this birthright citizenship case.
03:30And correct me if I'm wrong, my understanding is by statute and by the 14th Amendment, if you have a
03:36kid in this country, regardless of who you are, in all likelihood, that kid will be a U.S. citizen.
03:41The Trump administration wants to change that policy.
03:43Again, I'll ask you sort of what the arguments in that case tell you about what outcome we might see
03:47here when that decision is handed down.
03:49Yeah, that's exactly right.
03:51So the 14th Amendment enacted after the Civil War says that if you're born in the U.S. and, quote,
03:56subject to the jurisdiction thereof, you are a United States citizen.
04:00And that has long been understood as, as you described, basically making virtually everybody who is born on U.S.
04:06soil a U.S. citizen.
04:08And the president, when he came back into office last year, enacted an executive order that said, I'm going to
04:18limit that right to people who are born of either a U.S. citizen parent or a green card holder
04:26parent.
04:26And that would completely upend this understanding that everybody has had for for more than a century.
04:32The arguments, again, did not go especially well for the president on that issue.
04:38There was a good deal of skepticism, both on the constitutional point and the statutory point.
04:44The statutes you mentioned have the exact same language.
04:47So with both of those cases, even though this is a very conservative Supreme Court, it is not it would
04:54not both the cook and the birthright citizenship case.
04:57It would not at all be surprised a surprise for the Supreme Court to rule against the president.
05:02One of the other things I thought was interesting in the arguments is some of the justices were asking John
05:07Sauer, who's representing the government, essentially the status of the child would be in limbo and then would have to
05:14be litigated for months based on whether or not the president, I'm sorry, the parent was determined to domicile there,
05:20whether or not they had status.
05:22Like, it seems like the adjudication part of that would be just insurmountable and there's no apparatus to decide whether
05:29or not, you know, like there's no end point for that.
05:31Right. That was one of the big arguments, as well as just a lot of case law here going back
05:35to the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Dred Scott decision.
05:37This has been a long established precedent. The court would be asked to go against.
05:41Yeah. One of the big arguments against this is just that it would not be administerable if if a hospital
05:47has to check for a birth certificate of a parent
05:49or some other proof of citizenship from the parent in order to decide whether to issue a birth certificate to
05:57that child.
05:58There's also questions about what it would mean for people who are already born, people who were born to two
06:06noncitizen parents in the past.
06:08Is their citizenship suddenly in question?
06:11So a ruling that sided with the president that upheld this executive order would have tremendous implications.
06:19And we really don't know what all those implications are going to be.
06:23It would be a real challenge for everybody to figure out how it would be applied.
06:28Greg, our last question is a logistical one and somewhat selfish as well.
06:32It's completely selfish.
06:34So I understand tomorrow, Monday, 10 o'clock Eastern time.
06:37That's the first opportunity justices have to hand down these these decisions.
06:40I gather there's another date in the week ahead.
06:43Any likelihood that this gets pushed that we might get decisions in the week after, for instance?
06:47Also, as two people who have been on standby like three weeks in a row along with you for these
06:51decisions that haven't come down.
06:53Let's have it.
06:54So it's selfish for me, too.
06:56I certainly hope not.
06:57And in fact, I'm quite confident everything will come this week.
07:00In my time covering the Supreme Court, the only time the court has gone past the 4th of July was
07:05in the pandemic year.
07:06And that was obviously a different category because the whole schedule got upended there.
07:11I would be I don't know when that second day is going to be, but I would be very surprised
07:15if we didn't get the last Supreme Court opinions sometime either Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday.
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