The unaccountability trap in government

Earlier this summer, the Supreme Court held in Trump v. Slaughter that the president may remove at will the heads of so-called independent agencies. The Constitution vests the executive power in the president and charges him with ensuring the laws are faithfully executed. Those provisions, the court reasoned, require presidential control over subordinates exercising executive power and render statutory removal protections unconstitutional.

The same day, however, the court issued Trump v. Cook, which left in place removal protections for Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. Trump had purported to fire Cook, citing allegations that she had made false statements in connection with a mortgage. The majority opinion relied heavily on a contested historical analogy to earlier national banks and the perceived economic stakes of continued Fed independence.

That decision’s persuasiveness aside, there is broad agreement that monetary policy should be insulated from political actors. We don’t trust politicians to exercise restraint in the face of electoral pressures to juice the economy. Surveying our current office-holding politicians, that is an understandable concern. But perhaps the causal arrow runs in both directions, and our politicians have become less serious partly because we have defined their jobs downward.

By insulating major policymaking from democratic control, as we had done most obviously with independent agencies, we may have weakened our own incentives to demand serious political governance.

Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion in Cook makes the consequentialist case for independent monetary policy, citing “the calamities that could arise from even the ‘suspicion’ of political manipulation of........

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