On Monday evening, President Donald Trump opened up a new front in his campaign to take control of the Federal Reserve. He released a letter on social media purporting to fire Lisa Cook, a Joe Biden–appointed member of the Fed’s seven-person board of governors. The letter is part of what appears to be a coordinated effort by the administration to fill a majority of the board with loyalists. It is also a consequence of the Supreme Court’s willingness to throw out bedrock precedent and accept broad assertions of presidential power. The Court has created the conditions for a very dangerous situation: If the justices allow Trump’s removal of Cook to take effect, there will be little to stop him from driving other board members from their posts, and seizing power over the money supply.The Federal Reserve is one of the few holdouts in Trump’s assault on American institutions. Capturing it would provide the president with a big prize. Established by Congress to promote economic expansion, the Fed primarily oversees the country’s banks. To that end, it can create cash out of thin air. Although Congress designed the Fed to use this power in limited ways, beginning in the 1950s, the Fed has repeatedly deployed its “printing press” to reshape the financial system. And since the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed’s reach has grown considerably, with the central bank providing extensive ad hoc support to select financial firms, especially during periods of instability.Conventional wisdom has been that, given the dangers of putting an infinitely extensible balance sheet under the control of a single person, the Fed will survive Trump’s onslaught. Although the Fed’s board is not wholly independent of the president—its members are selected by him—the president is not legally permitted under the Federal Reserve Act to remove board members at will or direct how they carry out their duties. The law authorizes the president to remove board members only for cause.[Rogé Karma: The Lisa Cook case could be the whole ball game]The Fed’s board is one of a variety of government institutions whose leaders possess some form of tenure in office, including the federal courts (whose judges can be removed only by Congress) and multimember commissions such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Trade Commission, and National Labor Relations Board, whose members can also be removed by the president only for cause.Since taking office, however, Trump has repeatedly violated these restrictions. He has summarily dismissed, without cause, members of multiple agencies, including the NLRB, the FTC, and the Merit Systems Protection Board. And he has argued that he is entitled to ignore the law, because it unconstitutionally interferes with his inherent executive power.This argument is not new. It has been made—and rejected—before. In 1935, the Supreme Court famously, and unanimously, decided that Franklin D. Roosevelt lacked the power to remove a member of the FTC without cause, notwithstanding an opinion the Court had issued nine years earlier, in which Chief Justice William Howard Taft (a former U.S. president) had endorsed a broad conception of presidential power. In the 1935 case, Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S., the Court repudiated much of Taft’s reasoning and concluded that Congress had the power to insulate multimember commissions, such as the FTC, from direct presidential control.Just weeks after Humphrey’s Executor came down, Congress relied on it to significantly expand the Fed’s powers, a move that legislators were willing to make only in conjunction with changes that barred the president from firing board officials except for cause. In the decades since, the Court has repeatedly upheld similar removal limits on the grounds that they further, rather than hinder, the constitutional design. Congress meanwhile established various government agencies with semiautonomy from the White House, believing—rightly—that such autonomy can improve the quality of regulation produced by these bodies, by insulating them from partisan pressure and undue influence from businesses and other interests.So earlier this year, when Trump fired two officials, one at the NLRB and one at the Merit Systems Protection Board, without cause, the lower federal courts ruled against him. But then, in May, six Supreme Court justices stepped in to embrace some of the president’s arguments. In a stunning two-page ruling, Trump v. Wilcox, they forced these term-tenured officials out of their job, at least while Trump’s appeals are pending.Still, some Fed stalwarts took heart. Although the Federal Reserve made up no part of the case, the Court carved it out from the ruling. The Federal Reserve, the justices announced, would not necessarily be covered by their new interpretation of the president’s constitutional powers, because “the Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.” In other words, the Fed is special.[Annie Lowrey: The markets won’t save the Fed from Trump]But the Court’s carve-out was not as helpful as it seemed. Part of the problem is that it doesn’t make a lot of sense. The Fed’s board is not uniquely structured—it’s legally equivalent to the other multimember commissions that Trump is attacking. Nor is it quasi-private; it is an ordinary government agency. Nor does it really seem to follow in the tradition of the Bank of the United States, which was a bank. The Federal Reserve Board is a bank regulator.Another problem is that Wilcox is a new precedent for officials who are challenging their removal (as Cook is now). If these officials cannot serve while litigation is ongoing, then the president has an incentive to remove people even if the administration thinks the president may ultimately lose the case. And then there is the larger context: In Wilcox, the Court embraced an expansive theory of presidential power and accommodated the president’s removals when it should have enforced binding precedent. It therefore raised the likelihood that the Court would adopt a more deferential approach to “for cause” removals, one that is consistent with such a broad conception of the presidency.Over the past few months, the administration certainly appears to have been testing out this possibility.Since Wilcox, the White House has targeted Fed governors, in some cases publicly airing possible grounds for dismissing them. Jay Powell, whom Trump himself appointed as Fed chair back in 2018, has faced the most sustained assault. The administration has zeroed in on an expensive retrofit of two Depression-era buildings on Constitution Avenue, one of which, the Eccles Building, has been the board’s headquarters since 1937. These renovations are costing significantly more than was projected when they were first approved in 2017. On July 16, the president said Powell might have “to leave for fraud.”Later, the president visited the site to chastise Powell, with the cameras rolling. “Three Billion Dollars for a job that should have been a $50 Million Dollar fix up. Not good!” the president posted on August 12, appending the jab to a demand that Powell “lower the rate.” (Subtle.) Around the same time, another board member, Adriana Kugler, resigned her seat abruptly and without explanation. Last week, the administration turned to Lisa Cook, accusing her of mortgage fraud. When she refused to resign, the president posted a letter purporting to fire her for cause, making this the first for-cause removal attempt by a president of any official since the Nixon administration, and only the fourth in American history (the other two were done by President Taft). Although the president claims to comply with the statute’s for-cause requirement, as the Court suggested he must in Wilcox, he is really doing no such thing. For one, the president failed to offer Cook any legal process before attempting to remove her. For-cause removals are fundamentally different from at-will terminations. Cook has a vested legal right to serve out her term, and the president must act in an adjudicatory capacity to determine whether she has forfeited that right. Cook is therefore entitled to notice of the charges against her and an opportunity to be heard. As the Supreme Court explained in 1901 in Reagan v. U.S.: “Where causes of removal are specified by Constitution or statute, as also where the term of office is for a fixed period, notice and hearing are essential.” Otherwise, “the appointing power could remove at pleasure or for such cause as it deemed sufficient.” Findings of fact and conclusions of law are also necessary to enable judicial review of the president’s action. Here the president does not appear to have offered any process or prepared an adequate factual record. There is also a substantive legal problem: No precedent exists to support the notion that mere allegations of private misconduct constitute “cause” under the statute. The Federal Reserve Act uses broad language—“for cause,” without further elaboration. This language is more open-ended than statutes for most multimember commissions with term-tenured leaders, which authorize removals by the president for only three specified causes: inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office. All of these standard causes relate to an official’s work. None would permit the president to remove someone for conduct outside the job, before entering government service.[Jonathan Chait: What Trump’s feud with Jerome Powell is really about]The Federal Reserve Act language may encompass additional causes, such as those cited in other federal statutes. For example, one law cites “ineligibility”—a failure by an official to meet the statutory requirements to hold office. Another (for the board of directors of the Institute of Peace) lists “inability to discharge duties” and “conviction of a felony” alongside more conventional causes that the president can invoke. And at the Legal Services Corporation, Congress authorizes the president to remove officials “for offenses involving moral turpitude.”But none of these statutes cites allegations of past private conduct or anything of that nature. It would not make sense, for example, for Congress to authorize the president to determine, in the first instance, whether a private past crime had indeed been committed. One would expect that question to be worked out in state or federal court—with removal from office by the president, at most, following a conviction. Here there is not even an indictment.If the courts permit this removal, in which the removed official has no opportunity to contest the charges, we shouldn’t be surprised if the president subsequently attempts to remove Powell for cause in connection with the building renovations. Lisa Cook’s case is about much more than Cook herself. It is about the rule of law and whether this is “an Empire of Laws, not of men.” If the courts water down “for cause” removal to allow the president’s firing to proceed, even if just while the litigation proceeds, it will be another example of what Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson last week called “Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist.” “Calvinball,” she explained, “has only one rule: There are no fixed rules.” The Court, she noted, appears “to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.”