The Supreme Court's newest decision could make it impossible to end the shutdown [View all]
On Friday, the Supreme Court handed down an order that could completely upend the balance of power between Congress and President Donald Trump. The order effectively permits Trump to cancel $4 billion in foreign aid spending that he is required to spend under an act of Congress.
Trump claims the power to “impound” funds, meaning that he will not spend money that has been appropriated by Congress. Until Trump’s second election, legal experts across the political spectrum agreed that impoundment is unconstitutional. Indeed, many doubted whether someone could even make an argument supporting impoundment. As future Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote in a 1969 Justice Department memo, “it is in our view extremely difficult to formulate a constitutional theory to justify a refusal by the President to comply with a congressional directive to spend.”
The justices, however, appear to have voted entirely on partisan lines in Friday’s decision, in a case called Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition. All three of the Democratic justices dissented, while none of the six Republicans publicly disagreed with the Court’s decision. (The Court did not reveal how each of the Republicans voted, so it is theoretically possible that one of them quietly dissented.)
The Court’s decision, moreover, is wrong. The justices in the majority explained why they voted to let Trump cancel this spending in a single sentence. While they did not actually rule that Trump acted lawfully, they determined that “the Government, at this early stage, has made a sufficient showing that the Impoundment Control Act precludes” this suit, seeking to restore the funds in question, from moving forward.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/supreme-court-newest-decision-could-233108170.html
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