Summary
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell asserts that he cannot be fired by President-elect Donald Trump, citing legal protections under the Federal Reserve Act.
Trump has previously expressed his desire to remove Powell, but legal experts argue that a policy disagreement would not constitute “for cause” removal.
He is correct, though, that as the law currently stands, Trump can’t just get rid of him on his own authority. And changing the law does take time, theres a process to go through. It’s not like they can just pass a bill that says “Trump can do whatever he damn well pleases”. It has to be worded properly to pass legal muster. There are specific committees that deal with that stuff, and the legislators in charge of that want to keep ownership of it. And he would need to get the entire Republican Caucus to agree, since it will get no Democratic support at all. A handful of Republicans might have their own reasons to not make the changes Trump demands.
Trump can try without going through all that trouble, but the Powell gets to tell him to go pound sand, and the courts got the final say. Even if the courts are in the tank for Trump, it will still take time to resolve
If Trump wants him gone, he could probably manage it eventually, with enough effort. But will the administration be disciplined enough to see it through? They might decide other things are more important, like putting brown people in camps.
Since when have laws stopped, or for that matter slowed the trump administration
Law is a human construct, it is essentially a consensus structure. You can hold up a piece of paper that says “I can do what I want” and maybe it’s even legitimate, but you still need to convince other people of that and our legal structure/precedent puts more emphasis on process than being efficient or fast.
In effect, the law has stopped trump from doing just about everything he wants to sans a few items. Every time he tries to do something he has to fight a bunch of people and that takes up some of his finite time and resources.
Just because he has friends in all the high places doesn’t mean everyone else will just jump into line and do exactly what he wants, the more people obstruct the less damage he can do.