Sparks: US supreme court rules Trump’s firing of Lisa Cook from Fed was unconstitutional

Soft despotism finds its limit not in the passion of the people, but in the stubborn habit of administrative independence that protects the state from the very magistrate it helped to elect.

Stability in the executive department demands a duration in office that secures the deliberate sense of the community against those sudden breezes of passion which often blow from the seat of power.

If the law grants a term of years to a public servant, and the executive claims the right to shorten that term at his pleasure, then the law is no law at all.

Power in its feverish haste always seeks to break the vessel that contains it, forgetting that a ruler who ignores the law to strike his enemy only destroys his own shield.

The dismissal was absolute until the highest chamber determined that the procedure required to validate the dismissal had itself been dismissed by the very authority that attempted to exercise it.

Men struggle for titles and tenures in a court that will soon be forgotten, yet the duty of the moment remains simply to act according to the constitution of a rational being.

It is surely a most inconvenient arrangement for a prince to be expected to provide a reason for his displeasure, when the mere fact of his being displeased is reason enough for any loyal subject.

Justice without force is impotent, but force without justice is tyrannical; here the law wagers that a fragment of parchment can restrain the hand of a man who commands legions.

This judicial intervention acts as a collective superego, frustrating the primal urge of the leader to eliminate the symbolic mother who withholds the financial nourishment he demands for his own ego.

There is a fence around the independence of the treasury built by men who knew that if the king could touch the coins, he would soon forget he did not own the kingdom.

Power concedes nothing without a demand, and even the highest magistrate must be taught that the parchment of the Constitution is a wall he cannot scale with a mere stroke of his pen.

Upon reaching the capital, I find the inhabitants preoccupied with the strange rituals of their high court, which has just ruled that their chief may not discard a public official as easily as a worn-out boot.

In this land, the Sultan is checked by a council of elders who interpret the ancestral scrolls, ensuring that even the most powerful ruler cannot seize the seat of a judge without a righteous cause.

The President’s attempt to clear the room of unwelcome guests was met with the sort of firm judicial rebuke usually reserved for children who insist on feeding the goldfish to the cat.