President Donald Trump’s attempt to fire Lisa Cook, one of the seven governors of the Federal Reserve, is the kind of constitutional clash that feels less like a personnel dispute and more like a test of American democracy. It forces us to confront a question we rarely have to ask so bluntly: where does presidential authority end, and where must institutional independence begin?

Cook, appointed by President Joe Biden in 2022, is no stranger to breaking barriers. A daughter of Georgia, a Spelman graduate, former Michigan State University economics professor, and the first Black woman to serve as a Fed governor, she has spent her career bridging worlds of economics, policy, and justice. Her rise to the nation’s central bank carried symbolic weight, a signal to young Black scholars and to wo

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