The U.S. Supreme Court held oral arguments on Wednesday over whether Federal Reserve Board of Governors member Lisa Cook can stay in her job while she’s fighting her firing by President Donald Trump. The lower courts are dealing with the direct firing itself. Things didn’t appear to go well for the Trump administration with conservative justices, CNN reporters sai.“Is there any reason why this whole matter had to be handled…in such a hurried manner?” Justice Samuel Alito asked Solicitor General D. John Sauer. The conservative justice went on to call it “very cursory.”“What goes around comes around,” Justice Kavanaugh told Sauer. He remarked that a future president could just as easily fire Trump’s appointees for “cause” that could be “trivial or inconsequential or old allegations that are very difficult to disprove.”Trump alleged that Cook had a fraudulent mortgage application. Cook called it a mistake. But at one point, Alito asked whether “the mortgage applications are even in the record in this case.” They are not.“Is it grossly negligent to make a mistake on a mortgage application?” asked Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked after Sauer began saying Cook has no business being on the board after her “grossly negligent” act.Speaking to CNN about the case, reporter Phil Mattingly called the comments “remarkable,” watching “conservative justices level very significant questions that seem to imply significant concern about how this all happened.”He noted Alito’s comments, saying that the far-right judge “doesn’t often come at the Justice Department officials or the Trump administration during the cases that are argued.”It “doesn’t mean that he is going to go one way or another in this argument, but making very clear that he thought the way this case was presented, the fact that the mortgage documents in question are not actually in the record of the case, just social media posts with screenshots of them, and expressed some frustration of that,” Mattingly relayed. He also cited Kavanaugh’s question about the independence of the Federal Reserve. Justice Amy Coney Barrett was questioning the economic repercussions of the decisions. “Conservative justices right now are not cutting any slack to the solicitor general. We’ll obviously see how these arguments play out, but there seems to be a lot of skepticism in the early stage of these arguments,” Mattingly closed. Kristen Holmes commented in CNN’s rolling chat on the left side of the screen, “Kavanaugh sounds increasingly skeptical. A Trump administration official just texted me, ‘Doesn’t seem like this is going well for us right now.”Georgetown Law School Professor Steve Vladeck agreed, “Kristen, it isn’t.”Vladeck commented that Kavanaugh appeared to be “pouring some remarkably cold water on the Trump administration’s position.”Mattingly commented that the amicus brief sent from former Federal Reserve chairs and governors “resonated with at least two justices.”
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