The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday heard oral arguments in Trump v. Cook — a case some say crystallizes President Donald Trump’s ongoing tension with Black women leaders.
Fueling the case is Trump’s effort to break with more than a century of law and fire Lisa Cook, the first Black woman to sit on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, the rate-setting body for the central banking system of the U.S. Trump claims that she committed mortgage fraud.
President Joe Biden appointed Cook to her position in 2022. She has voted alongside Jerome Powell, whom Trump appointed to be Fed chair in 2018. The two have recently come to blows, as the administration has threatened Powell with a criminal investigation over testimony he gave in 2022 about the agency’s building renovations.
This isn’t the first time Trump has sparred with a Black woman in a position of power. Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, and Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, are two others who have clashed with the president in recent years.
Here’s what you need to know about the case, which is expected to be decided by the end of June or the beginning of July, and the larger concerns it raises about Trump’s targeting of Black women leaders.
What’s at issue in the case?
The question that the Supreme Court has set out to answer is whether it should leave a lower-court ruling in place, allowing Cook to keep her job, or pause that ruling, permitting Trump to fire her.
That lower-court ruling was issued last September by Judge Jia M. Cobb of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who concluded that Cook’s alleged actions failed to meet the threshold for sufficient cause. She also took issue with the administration’s perception of executive power.
“According to the government, the determination of cause is committed to the president’s discretion by statute, leaving no role for this court,” Cobb said in her ruling, referring to the fact that government lawyers had argued that it was within Trump’s power to decide what constitutes cause. “The court disagrees.”
What are Trump and Cook’s teams saying?
Trump’s lawyers argue not that he has free rein to fire whomever he wants — but rather that he has cause for firing Cook. They claim that she misrepresented her properties on documents to obtain lower mortgage rates.
Cook’s lawyers say that she has done nothing wrong, writing in her court filings that she “unequivocally” denies the administration’s accusations of mortgage fraud and that she’s ready to fight back.
The court on Wednesday seemed poised to side with Cook, with several conservative justices appearing skeptical of Trump’s attempt to remove her.
What broader patterns does the case show?
Legal experts and advocates have denounced Trump’s actions, putting them in the context of the president’s yearslong clashes with Black officials — particularly with Black women leaders.
“Trump’s attempt to fire Lisa Cook is another in a line of blatant attacks on Black women in positions of power with whom Trump disagrees or would like to intimidate,” Janai S. Nelson, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said in a Wednesday statement. “It is also a brazen power grab to control an independent Fed Board member who refused to bend to his demands to lower interest rates.”
She added that what’s happening to Cook “is not an isolated incident,” naming some of the other Black figures Trump has targeted.
“Over the course of his first year in office, Trump has repeatedly fired prominent Black officials serving in high-profile positions, including C.Q. Brown, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, Gwynne Wilcox, Chair of the National Labor Relations Board, and Charlotte Burrows, Chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,” Nelson said.
LaTosha Brown, the co-founder of Black Voters Matter, echoed these sentiments, maintaining that Trump uses race to attack those who stand in political opposition to him.
“Trump believes that all he needs to do is create an air of suspicion — to try to poke holes in Cook’s qualifications — to feed the racist trope that somehow, by the nature of who she is, she’s done something illegal,” Brown previously told Capital B. “We saw him do that with [former Vice President] Kamala Harris. We’re seeing him do that with [New York Attorney General] Letitia James.”