The Fed, the Supreme Court, and Their Legitimacy
On Friday, the Federal Reserve released a thorough report documenting how, ahead of the crash of Silicon Valley Bank, its bank supervisors failed to notice obvious warning signs, and were prevented by their bosses from acting on what they did spot. As the Prospect’s David Dayen wrote, the Fed effectively publicized to the world its incompetence and disinterest in the basic work of regulation.
“As the head of the government agency responsible for supervising SVB, (Federal Reserve Chair Jerome) Powell bears responsibility for the oversight failures that precipitated its collapse,” Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote at Project Syndicate last week.
Meanwhile, ProPublica’s three reports on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s extravagant gifts from right-wing billionaire Harlan Crow have inspired other reporting on ethics failures from the other Court conservatives, including Chief Justice John Roberts. Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin called for Roberts to testify about the Court’s ethics regime, an invitation that Roberts point-blank refused, thumbing his nose at a co-equal branch of government. The Court destroyed Americans’ right to reproductive autonomy last year under nonsensical pretenses, and now has its sights trained on student debt relief under self-refuting arguments.
The Fed and the Court are the two least democratic, and arguably most powerful, branches of the federal government today. In both, we see demonstrations of one of America’s founding principles: Unchecked power wielded by unelected rulers breeds corruption, and ultimately, tyranny. The Fed is not there yet, but the Court certainly is. It is past time for our actually elected leaders, including President Biden, to say so.
https://prospect.org/power/2023-05-05-fed-supreme-court-legitimacy/
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