Snapshot · The Bulwark Podcast
David French argued the Cook ruling essentially grandfathers in the Federal Reserve's independence because the reliance interests underpinning the global economy are too vast to unwind.
Where this was said
At 19:29 · chapter starts 17:48
French has read Cook twice and is 'kind of where you are' with Miller's layman's read: the Fed gets a carve-out that the FTC and SEC don't, essentially because it's always been there. The majority invokes Hamilton and Madison — getting dealt two aces in Texas Hold'em for any originalist argument — to argue the Fed-like structure would have been recognizable and permissible at the founding. [1] — David French "The Supreme Court preserved Federal Reserve independence in Cook not through airtight constitutional logic but through 'reliance interests'…" 17:48 But French finds that argument less than fully persuasive and pushes for intellectual honesty: just own the reliance interests argument. Kavanaugh's concurrence essentially says the quiet part loudly — we cannot introduce uncertainty into world markets. An entire global economic system has been ordered around Fed independence, and that's as strong a reliance interest as exists in law. The Chesterton's Fence principle applies: before tearing down the fence, figure out why it's there. French's critique is that the majority didn't run the same traps it ran in Slaughter — if the Fed has real governmental rulemaking power, which elected official is it accountable to? The opinion doesn't fully answer that. It just says the Fed is different. Own it.
The Supreme Court preserved Federal Reserve independence in Cook not through airtight constitutional logic but through 'reliance interests' — an entire global economy is built around the Fed's structure. Kavanaugh's concurrence essentially said: we cannot introduce uncertainty into world markets. That's the real argument, and it's time to own it.
The Slaughter ruling didn't just affect agency heads — it gutted the oversight architecture built after Watergate. Inspectors general, independent counsels, the whole structure was built with an expectation of independence that the Court has now withdrawn. A Congress that won't exercise its own power made this much worse.
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France built 56 nuclear plants in the 1970s and now has the cheapest energy in Europe, making it independent of Russian or Middle Eastern energy geopolitics.
Estonia has a single tax form, a law preventing the government from asking citizens for the same information twice, and a flat rate of tax — enabling competitive taxation.
Portugal's Lisbon, once a city with a major heroin problem, legalised drugs and redirected enforcement spending into rehabilitation and housing, dramatically reducing crime.
The first Boland Amendment banning CIA and Defense Department funds for the Contras passed the House unanimously — yet the Reagan administration ignored it.
Over just two years, Saudi Arabia alone donated $32 million to the Contra rebels, giving loosely affiliated factions millions they had no way to spend on arms.
The National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty raised $6.3 million for the Contras but only $3.3 million reached them — a shockingly low 52% program expense rate.
Richard Secord and Albert Hakim marked up their arms shipments to the Contras by as much as 300%, making enormous personal profits from the covert operation.
Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, tapped to run the entire covert Contra support operation, had no prior experience in covert operations whatsoever — he was learning as he went.
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