In a move that would have made the Emperor Diocletian weep into his purple robes, the Supreme Court has seen fit to block President Trump’s dismissal of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. This is not merely a legal skirmish. It is a symptom of a deeper rot, a judicial usurpation that mirrors the late Roman Empire’s descent into bureaucratic inertia while the barbarians mass at the gates.
Let us set aside the tedious legalities of the Appointments Clause and focus on the substantive idiocy: a central banker, unelected and unaccountable, is now shielded from the one mechanism of democratic control available to the executive. The Supreme Court, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that the President does not have unfettered power to remove a Fed governor. One wonders if the justices have ever read Article II. The President is the sole magistrate elected by all the people. To neuter his authority over monetary policy is to flirt with technocratic tyranny.
The Victorian era, that golden age of British statecraft, understood the necessity of ministerial responsibility. A governor of the Bank of England could be dismissed by a Chancellor, and that Chancellor could be dismissed by the Prime Minister. Accountability flowed upwards. The Founders designed a system where power checked power, but not where a lifetime appointee could defy the elected executive with impunity. We are now witnessing the birth of a new aristocracy: a class of financial mandarins who answer to nobody.
Cook’s defenders will bleat about “independence” and “stability.” But what independence is worth when it undermines the legitimacy of the state? The Federal Reserve has become a fourth branch of government, a star chamber of economists who have got more wrong than right. They failed to predict the 2008 crash. They printed money like drunken sailors during COVID. And now they are being protected from the man who won an election on the promise of draining the swamp.
This ruling is not a victory for the rule of law. It is a victory for the administrative state, that bloated leviathan that Horace would have recognised as a monster without a soul. The Court has essentially ruled that the President must prove cause for removal. Cause! As if the President were a mere manager, not the tribune of the people. Jefferson would have called for a revolution. Hamilton would have been apoplectic. We settle for punditry.
Let us also pause to consider the irony: a conservative-leaning Court protecting a Democratic appointee. This is the intellectual decadence I have long warned about. Originalists suddenly discover living constitutionalism when it suits their donor class. The Fed’s independence is a sacred cow, but the text of the Constitution is a dead letter. We are living in a simulacrum of democracy, where the forms remain but the substance has evaporated.
What does this mean for the future? It means that every future President, Republican or Democrat, will face a hostile bureaucracy immune to removal. It means that monetary policy will be set by an unaccountable elite, impervious to the whims of the electorate. It means that the American Republic has taken another step towards becoming a Graeco-Roman oligarchy, where a few powerful families and their technocratic allies rule a passive populace.
The only path forward is a constitutional amendment to clarify that the President may remove any executive officer at will. But of course, that will never happen. The machinery of government is too brittle, the consensus too fragile. So we shall muddle along, with the Supreme Court acting as the high priests of a secular religion they do not believe in.
Perhaps it is time to dust off the old histories. When the Roman Senate stripped the Emperor of the power to appoint provincial governors, the provinces fell to the Goths. When the British Parliament shackled the crown’s prerogative, the colonies were lost. We are witnessing not a mere legal dispute but a civilisational shift. The question is: are we too decadent to notice?
