Behold the latest chapter in our collective descent into institutional senility. In a world where reality has been relegated to the bargain bin of history, we find ourselves watching the Supreme Court of the United States engage in a rare, performative display of ‘concern.’ The subject? Whether the occupant of the Oval Office—specifically the one with the hair and the grievances—should be allowed to treat the Federal Reserve like a failing Atlantic City casino. The case involves Lisa Cook, a Fed Governor whose primary crime seems to be existing within the sightline of a man who views the entire federal government as a personal vending machine that occasionally refuses to dispense his favorite brand of ego-stroke.

On Wednesday, the robed ghouls who preside over our terminal legal decline seemed uncharacteristically hesitant. They peered over their spectacles at the prospect of Trump’s legal team arguing for the right to fire Fed governors at will, and for a brief, flickering moment, they appeared to remember that ‘independence’ is a word that actually exists in the dictionary. Of course, don't let this brief flirtation with sanity fool you. The Justices aren't protecting the sanctity of the republic; they are protecting the plumbing. The Federal Reserve is the great high temple of our late-stage capitalist delusions, a place where a small group of technocratic priests chant incantations about interest rates and ‘quantitative easing’ to keep the corpse of the global economy twitching. To allow a populist wrecking ball to start firing the priests because they didn't lower the cost of a mortgage during a rally is, apparently, a bridge too far even for this court.

Let’s look at the players in this tragicomedy. On one side, we have the Trumpian legal philosophy, which can be summarized as the ‘Unitary Executive Theory’ on methamphetamines. It posits that the President is not a public servant, but a sun-king who should be able to fire anyone from the Secretary of State to the guy who refills the staplers in the basement of the Department of Agriculture. To them, the independence of the Fed is a pesky bureaucratic myth that prevents the ‘will of the people’—which is a polite euphemism for the whims of the leader—from turning the printing press into a political toy. It’s the kind of logic that would make a third-world dictator blush, but in the modern GOP, it’s just Wednesday.

Then we have the Left, who have suddenly decided that the Federal Reserve—an institution they spent decades decrying as a shadowy cabal of banking elites—is now a sacred pillar of democracy that must be defended at all costs. Their hypocrisy is, as always, a masterclass in performative pearl-clutching. They don’t love Lisa Cook; they just hate the idea of Trump having a win. They want the Fed to be independent only as long as it’s doing the ‘correct’ things, like pretending that inflation is a transitory hallucination caused by everyone buying too much sourdough during the pandemic.

The Justices themselves are the most cynical actors of all. They sit there, draped in their polyester-blend authority, pretending to weigh the nuances of ‘for-cause’ removal protections while everyone knows the outcome is already a foregone conclusion based on how much it might upset the donor class. If the Fed loses its independence, the markets might—heaven forbid—experience a moment of honesty. And if there’s one thing both the Left and the Right agree on, it’s that we must never, under any circumstances, allow the markets to be honest. The entire house of cards depends on the fiction that the Fed is a neutral, scientific body, rather than a group of academics trying to prevent a total collapse with a series of increasingly frantic Band-Aids.

The arguments on Wednesday were a symphony of boredom and dread. The Justices worried that if they let the President fire a Fed governor today, he might fire the entire board tomorrow, and then who would be left to tell us that the economy is ‘fundamentally sound’ while we all struggle to afford a dozen eggs? It is a battle between two forms of incompetence: the raw, narcissistic incompetence of the executive, and the refined, institutional incompetence of the technocracy. We are being asked to choose between a king who wants to break the machine and a group of curators who want to keep the machine running until the fuel runs out.

In the end, the Court will likely side against the immediate firing of Cook, not because they care about the law, but because they care about the ‘stability’ of the grift. They know that if the Fed becomes just another political football, the game is over. And they aren't ready to stop playing. They will leave Cook in her seat, Trump will scream into the digital void about the ‘Deep State’ judicial system, and the rest of us will continue to drift toward the abyss, comforted by the knowledge that at least the people printing our worthless currency are ‘independent.’ It’s a farce, but at least it’s a farce with a high-end legal budget. We are watching the managed decline of an empire, and all we can do is argue over who gets to hold the steering wheel as we hit the canyon floor. It would be funny if it weren't so profoundly exhausting.