While Donald Trump and his Republican minions in the Senate are rushing to pack the Supreme Court with dangerous ideologues, the second-highest court in the land delivered Trump a severe blow on his most cherished symbol: the border wall. A three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit unanimously backed the House of Representatives and Congress' power of the purse. The lawsuit House lawmakers wish to bring against Trump, arguing his diversion of funds for the wall is illegal, can go forward.
The court wrote that the Constitution's grant of spending authority means it “requires two keys to unlock the Treasury, and the House holds one of those keys. The Executive Branch has, in a word, snatched the House’s key out of its hands.“ The opinion was written by Judge David B. Sentelle, who was appointed by Reagan and is a "conservative judicial icon and mentor to Justice Gorsuch." So that's interesting. He was joined by Obama-appointed judges Judges Patricia A. Millett and Robert L. Wilkins.
The Justice Department argued that the House could not proceed in suing Trump without the consent of the Senate, and that was slapped down as well. “The ironclad constitutional rule is that the Executive Branch cannot spend until both the House and the Senate say so,” Sentelle wrote. “Unlike the affirmative power to pass legislation, the House can wield its appropriations veto fully and effectively all by itself, without any coordination with or cooperation from the Senate.”
That's handy, too. House Democrats sued Trump, claiming he violated the Constitution by ignoring their expressed limits on funding when he diverted more than $6 billion that had been appropriated for other specific programs to build his wall. The three-judge panel said that the administration had unlawfully cut the House out of the appropriations process, “rendering for naught” its vote to deny the border wall funding.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi responded to the decision. “On a bipartisan basis, Congress has repeatedly refused to fund the President’s immoral, ineffective and wasteful border wall,” she said in a statement. “The House of Representatives is committed to upholding our authority as the first branch of government to ensure that funds appropriated by Congress for these vital initiatives are used as directed.”
This decision follows a full D.C. Circuit opinion last month that held the House alone did have standing to sue the administration. It remanded the case back to the three-judge panel that decided in the House’s favor on Friday. The Justice Department hasn't issued a response yet, but is likely to challenge the ruling.
