Kate Shaw, a contributing Opinion writer, hosted a written online conversation with William Baude, a law professor at the University of Chicago, and Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown and the author of “The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic,” to assess Wednesday’s Supreme Court oral arguments in Trump v. Cook. The case involves the president’s attempt to fire Lisa Cook, a Fed governor, and could have significant implications for both the global economy and the American presidency.

Will Baude: The only thing that surprised me is how thoroughgoing the court’s skepticism of the government’s position seemed to be. I expected it, but it was more than I expected.

Stephen Vladeck: When even Justice Samuel Alito is expressing skepticism toward the solicitor general, that’s quite a sign (albeit not necessarily about how Alito is going to vote). I guess my only surprise is why, if this is where they are, they didn’t just deny the Trump administration’s request for emergency relief outright back in October, rather than take the highly unusual step of deferring it, pending oral argument. I had interpreted that move as an expression of much more ambivalence from the justices than what we heard on Wednesday.

Baude: The case does present a lot of complicated issues — What is the standard? What kind of process is due? What kind of remedies are available? What is the harm to the government? — and it isn’t immediately obvious how to answer all of them, even if it is obvious that the government shouldn’t run the table on them.

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