Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello, everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us. And today we're going to talk about what's happening in the courts, kind of at all levels.
Over the past year, the Trump administration has done a lot in the courts and also fought a lot in the courts with lots of legal challenges to many of the administration policies they've been trying to roll out. But how well are these challenges actually working? And how is the Trump administration using the justice system to fight back? Plus, a big question for all of us here at Marketplace.
What does this mean for the economy? And so here to make us smart about this is someone who is very tuned in to what's happening in the courts. Kyle Cheney, who's a legal affairs reporter at Politico. Welcome back to the show, Kyle.
Good to be with you, Kimberly.
Chapter 2: What legal challenges has the Trump administration faced over the past year?
Thanks for having me.
Last time you were on Make Me Smart, we were talking about the January 6th investigations because you were deep into all those cases. And what January 6th actually meant for our democracy and the economy. We had a five year anniversary of the attack on the Capitol last week. What has it been like for you kind of looking back on your own coverage of these cases and where we ended up?
I mean, it's a great question and one I've grappled with a lot because it's a very different story arc if Donald Trump is not president today versus now that he is, what the meaning of that day and the sort of arc of history and the arc of presidential history and Washington history because what we'd be covering now if Donald Trump
lost the 2024 election is sort of the aftermath, the accountability phase of what happened on January 6th. The criminal cases would be playing out in courts. But instead, what we have is Donald Trump's return to power and his attempt to use that power to turn back on the people who pursued him. And also the lessons that he learned from that January 6th, which is that you can push
the boundaries of presidential power in ways that even cross legal and constitutional lines and not face consequences. And I think that is a through line that we see now in sort of how he's conducting himself in the second term.
I think that's exactly right. I mean, we have seen so many examples over and over again of the Trump administration and President Trump himself really pushing the bounds of what he can do and basically saying, you know, see you in court if you can make it happen.
Yeah.
Exactly. And that is what the story of this past year has been. The first year of Donald Trump's second term has been essentially pushing, as we said, right up to the line or past the line of what's constitutionally and legally allowed, banking on the Supreme Court, siding with him at the end of the day.
So even when lower courts are ruling against him, saying this is flagrantly illegal, hoping the Supreme Court goes the other way, and most of the time they've been correct about that, although not in every instance, and we can get into some of that.
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Chapter 3: How is the Trump administration using the justice system to fight back?
Speaking of independent agency heads, obviously huge news broke over the weekend, which folks, especially folks listening to Marketplace, have heard by now about the Department of Justice opening a criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. What is your take on this case and what it tells us about how Trump is using the justice system?
Sure. So what struck me the most was how quickly people who don't normally speak out, you know, some congressional Republicans to say this is not a legitimate criminal investigation, you know, even, you know. Even when Trump has gone as far over the line as we've seen him, congressional Republicans have usually been pretty reluctant to say, this is wrong, this is a problem.
And instead, what we saw here was the contrast to that. We saw a couple of Republican senators, actually at least three, maybe four Republican senators say, wait a second, this is not about criminal justice, this is about justice.
pressuring the Fed, trying to remove the independence of the Fed to comport with what Donald Trump wants their monetary policy to be as opposed to what their independent belief. And so we heard, of course, Chairman Powell say that out loud, but he got back up very quickly from a lot of places that don't always speak out against the president.
What's different now? Because as you said, I mean, we've really seen Republicans in Congress in particular stay very quiet for a lot of these moments where, as you said, Trump is sort of pushing the line or stepping over the line of what's constitutional and legal. What's different now?
I think in this case, number one, the pretext of why you would pursue a criminal investigation against Powell just didn't seem to add up. I think people said that it seemed so clearly pretextual that you just couldn't even pretend otherwise. And then on top of that, I think it is – the Fed has always been itself a sort of –
unique institution in our country that even the Supreme Court, while they've allowed the president to sort of fire at will almost anyone who runs any executive agency, they said the Fed is sort of an institution that stands on its own and may not be susceptible to the same kind of presidential control that other agencies are.
So the fact that this incursion directly aimed at the chairman of the Fed is happening now, it alarmed everyone and may not even survive at the Supreme Court if it ever gets there.
So we're talking about how Trump has been using the Justice Department and other legal avenues to kind of advance his agenda, but plenty of people are also using the justice system to push back against Trump's agenda. How successful have these efforts been to stop Trump in court?
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