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For well over a year, Donald Trump has made it very clear he has beef with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. From calling him a “numbskull” to a “stubborn moron” and threatening Powell with a “major lawsuit,” the president has been consistently bullying the chair to lower interest rates. Yet so far, Powell has not given in to Trump: On Wednesday, the Fed again declined to lower rates in the face of threats from Trump and after yet another report showing inflation to be stubbornly high.

Naturally, Powell’s refusal to yield led Trump to escalate, and soon enough the U.S. attorney’s office for D.C. launched a dubious criminal investigation to examine if Powell lied to Congress about the Fed’s yearslong renovation project of its headquarters. When prosecutors tried serving subpoenas to members of the Fed board last month, it immediately triggered a legal battle. And last week, James Boasberg—chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia—weighed in, mincing no words when agreeing to quash those subpoenas.

“There is abundant evidence that the subpoenas’ dominant (if not sole) purpose is to harass and pressure Powell,” Boasberg wrote, “either to yield to the President or to resign and make way for a Fed Chair who will.” The judge went on to point to “a mountain of evidence,” citing over a year’s worth of Trump’s own words, from interviews to Truth Social posts, in which he complained about Powell and said, again and again, that he wanted lower interest rates.

It’s worth mentioning that the president himself appointed Powell as Fed chair during his first term. Joe Biden then reappointed him to a second four-year term, which is set to end in May. Powell may not be going far, though, as he was separately confirmed to a 14-year term as Fed governor, a position that allows him to stay on the board of the Federal Reserve until 2028. (Governors typically resign altogether when their term as chair is up, but they have no obligation to do so, and Powell may not.) It is his continued presence on that board—along with Trump’s transparent desire to cow any other officials who might not bend to his whims—that has fueled Trump’s relentless pressure campaign, despite the fact that Powell has only two more months in the top job.

On Wednesday, following the Fed’s rate announcement, Powell upped the ante. After announcing that the Fed was holding interest rates, he vowed to remain in the job so long as the investigation into the Fed renovations was ongoing. “I have no intention of leaving the board until the investigation is well and truly over with transparency and finality,” he told reporters. He added that he hadn’t yet decided whether he would stay on as a member of the board after his term as chair ends, a successor is confirmed by the Senate, and the investigation is concluded, but suggested he could certainly stay in the job. “I will make that decision based on what I think is best for the institution and for the people we serve,” he said.

Why does Powell feel such freedom to stand up to Trump? The court’s role, and particularly Boasberg’s recent opinion, surely must be playing into this. “Apparently running out of patience, the White House recently launched a campaign to investigate Powell,” Boasberg wrote of the subpoena effort. Initiating a probe into the Fed’s renovations was a thinly veiled harassment campaign, as Boasberg concluded that the U.S. attorney’s office “produced essentially zero evidence to suspect Chair Powell of a crime; indeed, its justifications are so thin and unsubstantiated that the Court can only conclude that they are pretextual.” Still, quashing a grand-jury subpoena is one of the rarest of judicial actions. The Trump Department of Justice’s efforts had to constitute incredibly blatant bad faith to receive such a remarkable judicial pushback.

It couldn’t have helped the DOJ’s position that Boasberg is probably one of the most experienced jurists in the U.S. judiciary when it comes to dealing with this administration’s snaky tactics. Last year, Boasberg oversaw the legal battle over Trump invoking the Alien Enemies Act in order to justify sending planes loaded with immigrants to El Salvador’s CECOT megaprison. The White House defied Boasberg’s restraining order at the time—while the president publicly vilified him and called for his impeachment—only to have the Supreme Court go back and forth on the issue before essentially siding with the government. Adding insult to injury, the DOJ filed a frivolous ethics complaint against Boasberg for allegedly holding a meeting with other judges during which he expressed concerns about the Trump administration’s potential to trigger a constitutional crisis. The complaint was dismissed last month.

Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for D.C., immediately went to the press to discuss her feelings about Boasberg’s assessment of her subpoenas. Wasting no time in calling him an “activist judge,” Pirro said Boasberg’s decision “neutered the grand jury’s ability to investigate crime” and left Powell “bathed in immunity.” She vowed to appeal.

The Supreme Court Just Heeded One of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Sharpest Dissents

What Pirro is perhaps choosing to ignore here is that Boasberg found her office’s work so inept, and the president’s disdain for Powell so glaringly obvious, that he was left with no other choice but to set aside a grand jury’s decision. “He’s saying it is improper to use a grand-jury inquiry to try to exert political leverage on another component of the executive branch,” Frank Bowman, a law professor at the University of Missouri and a former federal and state prosecutor, told me. “And of course, Trump has made this easy for Boasberg simply by constantly shooting off his mouth.”

Last year, Trump proclaimed that Powell “must NOW lower the rate,” then, during a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, called the Fed chair a “fool,” adding: “I’d love to fire him. Maybe I still might.” (As discussed below, Trump doesn’t have the ability to fire Powell without just cause, and the Supreme Court has telegraphed that it would protect the Fed’s independence here.) On brand as ever, shortly after the release of Boasberg’s decision to quash, the president posted a staggeringly long rant on Truth Social. As he complained about being stopped from probing Powell’s construction project, he suggested that the contractors involved also be “heavily investigated” and called for Boasberg to be removed from the judiciary because he is a “Wacky, Nasty, Crooked, and totally Out of Control Judge” who suffers from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

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No matter how much Trump rails against the Fed, his legal battles against the institution are flailing—in part because it seems to be the one aspect of government that this Supreme Court will protect from presidential interference. Before Pirro went after Powell, Trump had tried to fire another Fed member, Lisa Cook, over flimsy allegations of mortgage fraud. But SCOTUS kept that attempted removal on hold while it considered the case. And during oral arguments in January, both the liberal and conservative flanks of the court expressed doubts in the government’s claim that Trump could oust Cook on the basis of an unproven allegation. “Once these tools are unleashed,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh—lately the president’s favorite justice—warned, “they are used by both sides and usually more the second time around. … What goes around comes around.”

We hope you learned a thing or two from this edition of Executive Dysfunction, and if you enjoyed reading it, please consider supporting our legal journalism by becoming a Slate Plus member!

Elsewhere in Jurisprudence

In the most recent episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick sat down with immigration and constitutional scholar Anna O. Law about her forthcoming book Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship. They break down the often ignored and disturbing history of mass migration in the U.S. and what exactly the Framers meant with the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment. Their conversation includes an explanation of the historic Wong Kim Ark birthright citizenship case of 1898 just as the Supreme Court gears up to hear arguments in the consequential Trump v. Barbara case next month.

In the most recent episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick sat down with immigration and constitutional scholar Anna O. Law about her forthcoming book Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship. They break down the often ignored and disturbing history of mass migration in the U.S. and what exactly the Framers meant with the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment. Their conversation includes an explanation of the historic Wong Kim Ark birthright citizenship case of 1898 just as the Supreme Court gears up to hear arguments in the consequential Trump v. Barbara case next month.

In the Slate Plus bonus episode, things get graphic as Dahlia and Mark Joseph Stern discuss Judge Lawrence VanDyke of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ shocking dissent in a case about protecting the rights of transgender women. “This is a case about swinging dicks,” VanDyke proclaimed, as he kicked off a lurid solo dissent that managed to insult 29 of his colleagues across the ideological spectrum. While the judge’s dissent grossly exaggerated the impact of the law in Washington state, it was clearly crafted for a singular audience: Donald Trump.

In the Slate Plus bonus episode, things get graphic as Dahlia and Mark Joseph Stern discuss Judge Lawrence VanDyke of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ shocking dissent in a case about protecting the rights of transgender women. “This is a case about swinging dicks,” VanDyke proclaimed, as he kicked off a lurid solo dissent that managed to insult 29 of his colleagues across the ideological spectrum. While the judge’s dissent grossly exaggerated the impact of the law in Washington state, it was clearly crafted for a singular audience: Donald Trump.

On Monday, the Supreme Court surprised Mark. It refused to allow the Trump administration to revoke temporary protected status for more than 350,000 immigrants from Haiti and Syria. Instead, it agreed to take up the government’s case, which argues that it can revoke this status—this is something Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has been fighting for nearly a year now. As Mark explains, the president’s attack on TPS “is one of the most far-reaching nativist policies of his second term,” and lower courts have consistently rejected it. By agreeing to take up the case on the merits, SCOTUS gives immigrants with TPS a few more months to plot a new life, in the likely event that the court’s supermajority sides with the Trump administration.

On Monday, the Supreme Court surprised Mark. It refused to allow the Trump administration to revoke temporary protected status for more than 350,000 immigrants from Haiti and Syria. Instead, it agreed to take up the government’s case, which argues that it can revoke this status—this is something Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has been fighting for nearly a year now. As Mark explains, the president’s attack on TPS “is one of the most far-reaching nativist policies of his second term,” and lower courts have consistently rejected it. By agreeing to take up the case on the merits, SCOTUS gives immigrants with TPS a few more months to plot a new life, in the likely event that the court’s supermajority sides with the Trump administration.

Friend of Slate Hannah Story Brown, deputy research director on climate governance at the Revolving Door Project, made an interesting observation when SCOTUS agreed to take up a new climate case. Nowhere to be found were the words that had appeared in previous such cases: “Justice Alito took no part in the consideration or decision of this petition.” Brown explains Alito’s past with cases concerning oil and gas companies, with the justice often recusing himself from participation because he has invested somewhere between $60,000 and $245,000 in individual oil, gas, and coal companies. In this critical instance, though, Alito has refused to recuse, even though his conflict of interest hasn’t changed.

Friend of Slate Hannah Story Brown, deputy research director on climate governance at the Revolving Door Project, made an interesting observation when SCOTUS agreed to take up a new climate case. Nowhere to be found were the words that had appeared in previous such cases: “Justice Alito took no part in the consideration or decision of this petition.” Brown explains Alito’s past with cases concerning oil and gas companies, with the justice often recusing himself from participation because he has invested somewhere between $60,000 and $245,000 in individual oil, gas, and coal companies. In this critical instance, though, Alito has refused to recuse, even though his conflict of interest hasn’t changed.

In more analysis in the lead-up to Trump v. Barbara oral arguments, friend of Slate Smita Ghosh, appellate counsel at the Constitutional Accountability Center, explains how a lesser-known inheritance case from 1844 could very well become an important piece in the debate over birthright citizenship. The case of Lynch v. Clarke came about at a time when noncitizens could not inherit land, resulting in a dispute over whether a child born in the U.S. to parents who were temporary visitors here was still entitled to her family’s property. Ghosh argues that “Lynch illustrates that the traditional concept of citizenship was broader than the permanent-allegiance-and-domicile rule that Trump’s lawyers are advancing.”

In more analysis in the lead-up to Trump v. Barbara oral arguments, friend of Slate Smita Ghosh, appellate counsel at the Constitutional Accountability Center, explains how a lesser-known inheritance case from 1844 could very well become an important piece in the debate over birthright citizenship. The case of Lynch v. Clarke came about at a time when noncitizens could not inherit land, resulting in a dispute over whether a child born in the U.S. to parents who were temporary visitors here was still entitled to her family’s property. Ghosh argues that “Lynch illustrates that the traditional concept of citizenship was broader than the permanent-allegiance-and-domicile rule that Trump’s lawyers are advancing.”

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