Comment Rescue: DavidTC on the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Unfreezing of Funds
From Roll Call: Supreme Court orders clarity on order unfreezing USAID funds
So, we have a bunch of Supreme Court justices showing their true colors there.
For those who do not remember what happened, a lawsuit was filed about USAID about the failure to pay debts that were already incurred and mandated by law, and Judge Amir Ali of the U.S. District Court issued an order saying ‘No, you have to keep paying those for now, the law provides a way to claw back fraudulent purchases and it gives absolutely no ability to do what you are doing’.
They were given a deadline of fifteen days. Fifteen days passed.
The judge issued _another_ order, saying ‘I am not kidding, do this in the next two days, or I will start throwing lawyers in jail for contempt’.
The government, having failed to follow the first court order, then panicked and tried to get the Supreme Court to step in. (Like, we’re already at a bad place here. You can’t fail to follow court orders for two weeks and then, at the deadline, run somewhere else.)
The Supremes did, pausing that order for a week, until they ruled. Well, that just happened, they said ‘Of course you have to follow that, it’s a judge, you’re in a lawsuit, you have to do what he says.’. …or at least, the people on the court who believe in some sort of rule of law did.
From others, you get this nonsense:
“Does a single district-court judge who likely lacks jurisdiction have the unchecked power to compel the Government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever) 2 billion taxpayer dollars? The answer to that question should be an emphatic ‘No,’ but a majority of this Court apparently thinks otherwise,” Alito wrote. “I am stunned.”
Hey, Alito, pssst: What compels the US government to release the funds is the _law_. Both appropriations and, perhaps more relevantly, normal contract law. They did the work, the government has to pay them. Which a judge just ruled on.
And they _did_ appeal it. To literally the Supreme Court. Were you not paying attention?
And how does a District of Columbia district court judge not have jurisdiction over ‘Someone suing the Federal government for not getting paid, which was apparently done by decisions at the White House’? What are you talking about? Who has jurisdiction instead?!
Also, aren’t you the same people who have no problem with a single Texas judge issuing restraining orders outlawing medications across the entire US?
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Anyway, we have two fun questions here:
Will the US government decide to comply with this?
Who knows.
The second question is funnier: Can the US government comply with this, or is it so dysfunctional that it cannot put this stuff together in time?
They are already a week past the second deadline, which itself was a few days after the actual original deadline. The Supreme Court just said the judge should ‘clarify what obligations the Government must fulfill to ensure compliance with the temporary restraining order, with due regard for the feasibility of any compliance timelines.’, but honestly, as the Government has made absolutely no effort at any point to actually met any deadline, I suspect we’re going to get Judge Amir Ali saying ‘The first order of business today is where I make up a list of people who go to jail tomorrow if it is not done by then.’
The really really funny thing is if the US government cannot actually manage to do it in that timeframe, because the power to do it is in the hands of some 25-year-old techbro who does not actually understand the magnitude of what is going on, and possibly cannot be located in the timeframe because he’s ran off to fire all gay people at the NSA or whatever.
Which sounds unfair, but I remind everyone the government had two weeks to do this, in which they did nothing, then had another week do to this, and if they again did nothing, and are not ready to actually do this, they deserve to be pretty strongly sanctioned by the court.
On the Pollyanna side it’s good to see that a bare majority of the Supreme Court can be counted on to do the absolute bare constitutional minimum vis a vis Trump and the Muskrats.
On the realist side- holy fish did you read the deranged gabbling from the dissent? Alito basically did just rip the mask off and cackle “you fools, forget textualism and originalism, it was all just a feint, it was just will to power all along mwhahahaha!”
And, also, holy fish a bare minimum of the Supreme court justices required to uphold the law stepped up in the very barest minimal way.Report
I’m just glad they actually did. Because my gosh.Report
Likewise, but Chris’ comment below remains pertinent; let us hope it’s pessimistic and not prescient.Report
People have talked about this administration producing Constitutional crises, but I suppose here’s the first chance for them to produce a genuine one: do they comply with an order of the Supreme Court, or do they simply ignore it? I’m actually betting they’ll ignore it. And even if they actually comply, what will the administration’s response be? Packing the court? Getting to Congress to say he doesn’t have to pay the money? Going after individual justices? Some combination of all three? So many opportunities for real Constitutional crises. These are exciting times.Report
Here’s a copy of the order (warning: PDF).
The right-wingers I’ve seen are pointing out that a single judge can force the government to send taxpayer dollars overseas!!!
The left-wingers I’ve seen are pointing out that this ruling applies *SOLELY* to work that has already been completed! It’s basic contract law!
And I’m looking at this part from the ruling again: “clarify what obligations the Government must fulfill to ensure compliance with the temporary restraining order, with due regard for the feasibility of any compliance timelines”
I think that this phrasing is agreeing 100% with the left-wingers and is not talking, for a single second, about what Alito is talking about.Report
Probably because Alito is incoherent and deranged. Yes a single judge can force the government to sent taxpayer dollars overseas… … If those dollars were first duly appropriated and assigned to the sending organization by the House and then approved by the Senate and then signed off on by a President and even then only if those dollars were unlawfully impounded by a President and his billionaire appointed/not appointed/who knows side kick/co-president.Report
I see Alito as being coherent (though, perhaps, deranged). There’s an argument that he sees coming and he wants to cut it off at the pass and, as such, attempted to. Failed, of course.Report
Alito is imagining an entirely different case in front of him. Alito seems to think the case will eventually get to whether or not DOGE can do what it is doing.
As an aside: He’s probably wrong about that. This case sounds like basic contract and employment law. Those contracts will have penalties for breaking them, and the government will have to pay them. Likewise, the various labor violations for failing to pay employees while overseas.
And, people can disagree on that, that’s why we’re having a court case, but my point is, in this case, it doesn’t matter why the government has done these harmful things to the plaintiffs or what process they did or did not follow, the issue is the harmful things. Even if this had been done because Congress had passed a law and the president signed it, this suit would exist. (Not the Congress would ever be so stupid as to pass a law stranding employees overseas or trying to not pay debts. And a chunk of this was the sheer lack of warning.)
HOWEVER, more to the point for what Alito said, the specific decision in front of him is solely over a temporary restraining order stopping the government from failing to pay already completely work. It doesn’t matter what the case is over, the TRO is ‘Keep printing the checks for the money you already owe people. (You goddamn lunatics.)’. It has nothing to do with DOGE or whether they or the executive in general can cut off contracts or withhold appropriations or anything.
I think the fact that Alito and three other justices jumped the gun here (For a case that probable isn’t relevant at all to DOGE.) says a hell of a lot about their honesty.
And over the next few months, it’s going to be incredibly weird watching people on a court that just decided that they, not the executive, got to decide how to interpret the law, suddenly deciding that the executive can just break laws.Report
We have plenty on the record of DJT stiffing contractors. The more amazing part is he got 4 Supreme Court justices to say that kind of behavior is OK.Report
I like the idea that a ‘single judge’ is somehow not enough.
What does that mean?
Yes, Alito, a single judge can, via due process of the law, decide that a party cannot stop disbursing payment to the another part yin a lawsuit, in violation of the law. Because things in individual cases are generally decided by single judges. The judge in charge of the case.
We don’t really have a process where multiple judges vote on a thing in a case, or whatever you think happen, except at the Supreme Court level…which you did? You were part of it?Report
My thanks to the power-that-be to make DavidTC’s original post a full topic.Report
“powers that be for making”.Report
Alito: The executive can make ‘regulations’ all they want, but Chevron is dead, we will no longer defer to to those regulations. Instead, the courts themselves will look at the law, the actual code passed by Congress and signed into law., which the executive has to follow, without paying much attention to ‘regulations’ that the executive has invented to go on top of that.
This will result in a lot of people (including the most important people, corporations) that are bound by those regulations suing, to try to get them overturned. And if this happens, the court will direct the executive to stop enforcing those regulations and do something else.
This is clearly what we want and understand will happen.
*one year later*
Alito: Yes, the executive has chosen to do things that appear in violation of the plain letter of law, and court decided that it was in violation.
But, like, let’s ask ourselves, what are we really talking about here: Does that court even have the _jurisdiction_ decide something like that? Do we, as the courts, even have a right to comment on how they understand the law with regard to themselves? That seems like an internal matter for the executive branch.
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I guess it’s not really the same thing, in that DOGE is operate entirely outside the entire regulatory system set up by law, and moreover is operating in complete violation of basically every law and even the constitutional ‘advise and consent’ clause. (Is Elon in charge of this thing, or not?!). Instead of Congress explicitly delegating power by making a law that says ‘Hey, Executive branch, we want you to enforce rules to accomplish X, a thing that is way outside our scope of knowledge, so we won’t make the specific rules. Instead, here is a system for that that will take people with expertise and a bunch of outside comment to make some regulations regulating X in a long careful process. Do that, and then enforce those regulations’.
The Executive coming up the exact amount of fire resistance a building needs, and requiring that: Conservatives on the Supreme Court say no, only _they_ get to decide how much a building needs.
The Executive driving down the road shooting off shotguns and hurtling Molotov cocktails at buildings: Conservatives on the Supreme Court say ‘Are we really allowed to say they can’t do that?’Report
Well, yesterday the judge gave them until Monday to release already incurred costs.
https://apnews.com/article/usaid-trump-foreign-aid-funding-freeze-02e8ed553e55c79c43fe8811de952d02
Let’s see if they manage to hit the deadline.
Also, the judge has has asked questions that indicate he thinks the government’s case is incredibly weak, and that it does not have any authority to cut off specific appropriations like that.
I think the Trump Administration accidentally wandered into the wrong battlefield here. It is one thing to pretend that you are simply cutting back unneeded things, spending less money while continuing its mission. It is another thing to walk in and announce are fully dismantling an organization that exists by law, and by law was handed money that it is supposed to give to explicitedly-listed other organizations.
Ie, if an appropriation bill, aka the law, says that USAID is to pay X million dollars to the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition a year in return for specific services, the executive cannot just refuse to do it and dismantle the agency.
There might be some certain level of fudge around appropriation, some fudge of which exist by law, some of which is perhaps even more malleable than that, but that is so for outside of it that the judge isn’t going to go for it.
One can imagine a universe in where a different Administration was canny and sort of tried to work its way up to that point.
Meanwhile, in other news, the executive has announced that it is going to try to start prosecuting U SAID workers. ‘Why’ appears to be unclear except that, you know, the poem ‘First they came for’ needs a couple of stances, and ‘foreign aid worker’ should fit quite nicely in there.Report