Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook is asking a U.S. appeals court to reject the Trump administration’s latest bid to remove her from her post ahead of the central bank’s next vote on interest rates.

In a filing with the court Saturday, attorneys on behalf of Cook asked the court to refuse an emergency request by the Trump administration for a stay of a lower court ruling that would clear the way for President Donald Trump to remove Cook from the Federal Reserve’s board of governors.

Lawyers for Cook argue that the Trump administration has not shown sufficient cause to fire her, and stressed the risks to the economy and country if the president were allowed to fire a Fed governor without cause.

“A stay by this court would therefore be the first signal from the courts that our system of government is no longer able to guarantee the independence of the Federal Reserve. Nothing would then stop the president from firing other members of the board on similarly flimsy pretexts. The era of Fed independence would be over. The risks to the nation’s economy could be dire,” according to the filing.

The court has given the Trump administration the option to respond to Cook’s filing by 3 p.m. Eastern on Sunday.

At stake is whether the Trump administration will succeed in its extraordinary effort to shape the board before the Fed’s interest rate-setting committee meets Tuesday and Wednesday. At the same time, Senate Republicans are pushing to confirm Stephen MiranPresident Donald Trump’s nominee to an open spot on the Fed’s board, which could happen as soon as Monday.

Trump has accused Cook of mortgage fraud because she appeared to claim two properties as “primary residences” in July 2021, before she joined the board. Such claims can lead to a lower mortgage rate and smaller down payment than if one of them was declared as a rental property or second home.

Cook has denied the charges and sued the Trump administration to block her firing.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Jia Cobb ruled the administration had not satisfied a legal requirement that Fed governors can only be fired “for cause,” which she said was limited to misconduct while in office. Cook did not join the Fed’s board until 2022.

The administration then appealed the decision and asked for an emergency ruling reversing the lower court order by Monday. In their emergency appeal, Trump’s lawyers argued that even if the conduct occurred before Cook’s time as governor, her alleged action “indisputably calls into question Cook’s trustworthiness and whether she can be a responsible steward of the interest rates and economy.”

If the Trump administration’s appeal succeeds, Cook would be removed from the Fed’s board until her case is ultimately resolved in the courts, and she would miss next week’s Fed meeting, when the central bank is set to decide whether to reduce its key interest rate.

If the appeals court rules in Cook’s favor, the administration could seek an emergency ruling from the Supreme Court.

The Fed is under relentless pressure from Trump to cut rates. The central bank has held rates steady since late 2024 over worries that the Trump administration’s unpredictable tariff policies will reignite inflation.

Last month, Fed Chair Jerome Powell signaled that Fed officials are increasingly concerned about weaker hiring, setting the stage for a rate cut next week. Most economists expect the Fed will cut its benchmark interest rate by a quarter-point to about 4.1%.

When the Fed reduces its key rate, it often, over time, lowers borrowing costs for mortgages, auto loans, and business loans. Some of those rates have already fallen in anticipation of cuts from the Fed.

In his sharply differing reactions to two high-profile assassinations of political figures this year, the president of the United States has effectively encouraged the public to apply a partisan lens to the value of human life.

The two killings in question — a lone wolf assassination of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman in June and the shooting of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk at a Utah Valley University speaking event this past week — elicited very different kinds of treatment from the White House. President Donald Trump gave scant attention to Hortman’s killing, while he framed the killing of Kirk as a cataclysmic national tragedy and a political rallying cry for the right.

Republican lives matter more than Democratic lives, Trump is effectively telling his base.

Republican lives matter more than Democratic lives, Trump is effectively telling his base. And in a shocking comment on “Fox & Friends” on Friday, Trump appeared to use Kirk’s assassination to explicitly designate political violence a partisan issue too, by defending violent right-wing extremists as sharing his political goals of bringing down “crime” and left-wing extremists as “the problem.”

In response to the murder of Hortman, Trump offered a brief, impersonal condemnation of her killing on Truth Social, stating that “such horrific violence will not be tolerated.” He didn’t do much else. He did not offer a substantial eulogy for her, or deliver an address on political violence, as he did after Kirk’s death. Unlike former President Joe Biden, Trump did not attend the funeral. The day after Hortman’s killing, when Trump was asked if he had called Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, he said, “I could be nice and call, but why waste time?” Trump suggested that part of the reason he didn’t want to call Walz was because he thought Walz was to blame for the killing, or at least the events leading up to it. That claim was nonsense. But peddling that narrative did allow Trump to divert attention from the fact that authorities found the suspected shooter had a hit list that named mostly Democratic politicians or figures tied to abortion rights, and that his close childhood friend said he voted for Trump.

In response to Kirk’s killing, Trump responded with tremendous urgency. He immediately issued an order to lower American flags to half-staff at the White House, all public buildings, U.S. embassies and military posts. He announced he would award Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously. He delivered a wrathful four-minute video address from the White House condemning Kirk’s assassination and promising vengeance against the left. As my colleague Anthony Fisher notesduring that address he made “wildly irresponsible assumptions about the then-unknown suspected killer’s motives. He completely ignored right-wing violence (like the kind he incited in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021), and he explicitly threatened to bring down the force of government on his political opponents.”

It was bad enough that Trump showed such divergent responses to the equally indefensible assassinations of Hortman and Kirk — and used the latter to promote the idea of a political crackdown on the left. But his appearance on Fox News on Friday morning involved what I found to be a genuinely jaw-dropping escalation, as he appeared to suggest that violence from the right was more defensible than violence from the left. Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt noted that there are radicals on both the right and the left and expressed concern about people cheering for Kirk’s death before asking Trump, “How do we fix this country?” He replied:

What Trump appears to be saying is that left-wing radicals are a problem, while right-wing extremists are, in essence, part of his political project and therefore don’t deserve condemnation — or at least not the kind of condemnation that those on the left do. He is effectively telegraphing the idea that a certain degree of political violence on the right could be acceptable — or at least should be seen as politically sympathetic and well-intentioned. As right-wing extremists are reactivating and rallying around Kirk’s death as a pretext for revenge against the left, Trump’s new statement echoes his “stand back and stand by” order to the Proud Boys in 2020 before they stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. It would be reasonable in this context for right-wing extremists to surmise that Trump is again signaling that he could be lax on enforcement or try to offer them some kind of immunity — just as he did by commuting the sentences of Proud Boys and pardoning their leader.

In a democracy, all political violence should be considered entirely unacceptable, no matter the ideology of the person committing the act or on the receiving end of it. Both the deaths of Hortman and Kirk were terrible tragedies and completely unjustifiable. But in his selective mourning and politicization of their deaths, Trump suggested one tragedy — more importantly, one type of tragedy — mattered more.

Zeeshan aleem

Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for BLN Daily. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Blue Light News, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter here.