Episode Details

For all my interviews and more, subscribe on YouTube.

Lisa Graves is the author of Without Precedent, a history and analysis of the Roberts Court and the expert on how the Federalist Society has been working to undermine democracy. Yesterday this happened:

So I managed to arrange a conversation with Lisa about what is happening:

. . .

TRANSCRIPT: Paul Krugman in Conversation with Lisa Graves

(recorded 6/29/26)

Paul Krugman: Hi everyone. This is a bit of an emergency recording and podcast because today, which is Monday as we’re recording this, the Supreme Court has just handed down several decisions, of which one was really alarming. And I had talked earlier with Lisa Graves, head of True North Research, and Court Accountability who had been warning about all this stuff when I talked with her previously and on other occasions. And I wanted to get somebody who’s actually following this to weigh in. So, hi Lisa.

Lisa Graves: Paul, thank you so much for inviting me back on. I really appreciate it.

Krugman: Yeah. So, there were obviously several decisions that came down, but Humphrey’s Executor… This is absolutely mind-boggling. So why don’t you talk about Humphrey’s Executor and then we’ll talk about the background and what this says about the Roberts Court?

Graves: Yes. Today’s Slaughter case involving the FTC, is a case where the Roberts Court has overruled nearly a century of legal precedent which prohibited presidents from firing commissioners, specifically on the Federal Trade Commission, the case that you mentioned, Paul. Humphrey’s Executor was specifically about the FTC. It was about this provision that barred FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, from firing someone whom Hoover appointed to that commission. When Congress created the FTC, it set a standard that required that you would have to have cause to fire someone outside of their term.

The way the FTC is set up is that it has five commissioners by statute. Three of those commissioners are appointed by the president, two from the president’s party, and two are not from the president’s party. What’s happened over the past year is since Donald Trump became president again, he fired the Democratic commissioners on that commission. And so for the last 15 months, that commission has had only two commissioners, two Republican appointees, which has meant there hasn’t been a Democrat even in the room to consider these cases that are brought to the FTC, which relate to the power of huge corporations to merge with one another or not. And so, in essence, the FTC investigates proposed mergers and other things that might be considered a restraint on trade or affect the ability of consumers to get a fair price on things, for example. And what Trump has done is that he’s basically dominated that board in defiance of the plain language of the statute.

So any legal action by Donald Trump that has been counte