Emily Bazelon

Exactly.

I think generally, though, Aaron, I mean, I would agree with you that, you know, the conservatives who dominate the court right now had an expansive theory of executive power that allows for a lot of firing of agency leaders, right?

Board members of the Federal Trade Commission, et cetera, et cetera.

And I think

that that challenge to how our agencies have operated in this kind of quasi-independent way is going to succeed, and it's going to really shift power toward the president.

And in a sense, and I feel like I've learned this from writing back and forth with David about it, this is like a longstanding conservative principle, and it would be surprising for the conservative justices to walk away from it.

And yet the timing of it means that the person who they are giving much more power to, the actual president in office, is Donald Trump.

Maybe for some of them that's like kind of inconvenient.

You could imagine that Chief Justice Roberts would prefer that a more honorable president was actually in office while he was doing this.

But when people who've been eyeing a goal for a long time, whether it's, you know, jurisprudence or legislation, get a chance to enact it, it's hard for them to resist.

And so I feel like that is part of the dynamic here.

I wonder, David, how you think about that part of how our legal landscape is changing.

Well, one way to think about both of those questions is, can courts save American democracy?

What is their actual role here?

And I think what we're seeing is they can't do it on their own, right?

So, I mean, I would argue that the lower courts have been really pretty stalwart at

since Trump took office in standing up for the rule of law and pushing back in calling the president's bluff on a number of fronts.

I think the Supreme Court has been far less effective.

Whatever its frustration with the emergency docket, until the decision about the National Guard in Chicago, Trump, the administration had an almost unbroken string of victories on the emergency docket.

So we've seen the Supreme Court exceed in a number of domains.