Ed. note: Welcome to our daily feature, Quote of the Day.
I have personal experience of challenging actions of the administration to accrue power for themselves at the expense of Congress, of the people, and I have experienced challenging that all the way up to the highest court in the land.
And my immediate reaction, on reading the story that Yale was considering settling, is that it cannot be that I, Becca, normal human, had the wherewithal to challenge something that was wrong and an abuse of power, and Yale — with its $44 billion endowment — does not.
— Rebecca Slaughter, former commissioner for the Federal Trade Commission before she was fired by Donald Trump without cause, in comments given to the Yale Daily News, concerning Yale’s settlement talks with the Trump administration. Slaughter went on, encouraging her alma mater to stand up for itself, saying, “It’s not fun to push back — it’s much nicer to sort of think about how to walk away or make it go away in the short term — but it’s so much better in the long term to stand on principle.” Last month, the Supreme Court upheld Slaughter’s firing in a landmark decision, thereby expanding presidential power and overruling nearly a century of precedent.
Staci Zaretsky is the managing editor of Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Bluesky, X/Twitter, and Threads, or connect with her on LinkedIn.