Lev Menand
speaker
1,295 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 17 Jul
Lev Menand’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Why didn't the court embrace it?
Well, one problem is it's really inconsistent with their theory of the constitution separation of powers, which is a formalist theory because it says things that impede functionally
on Congress's power of the purse, well, we can't allow the president to control them.
Well, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System isn't the only part of the federal bureaucracy that implicates Congress's power of the purse.
And so there's a very important Supreme Court case from the 1980s called Bauscher v. Sinar, which was about the Emergency Deficit Reduction Act.
where Congress was trying to ensure that the government didn't spend over certain spending levels to help bring down the deficit in the 1980s.
And as part of that law, it was a bipartisan compromise with the Reagan administration, an officer called the Comptroller General, who the president cannot remove at will.
was given the authority to calculate certain caps.
And the court struck that down, said the Comptroller General cannot have that power because that's an executive function.
And this is an officer the president doesn't have the right to remove.
And during that period, people thought we were going to have a resurgence of Myers.
What we just had in slaughter, they thought was going to happen in the 80s.
And the court is committed to that.
They don't want to give Congress
the power of the purse in that way that you're suggesting, because it would mean that other functions besides the Federal Reserve Board would need to be protected from presidential plenary power.
The Fed is not safe.
This is not a good situation that the Fed has found itself in.
The Fed is an endangered species now.
It might be the only independent agency that's constitutionally permissible.
The court has gone out of its way to delegitimize independence and nonpartisan administration.
Showing 201–220 of 1,295 · page 11 of 65
← Previous
Next →