Congress

Congress hankers for closure in funding war with Trump. SCOTUS is slow to deliver.

Published

1 year ago

September 2, 2025

Lawmakers have been waiting all year for the Supreme Court to save them from President Donald Trump’s unprecedented moves to suspend funding Congress already approved. But they might not get closure anytime soon.

Trump began freezing federal cash the day he was sworn into a second term as president. Seven months later, the courts are littered with legal challenges to his administration’s abrupt, massive and often indiscriminate cuts to spending, contracts and personnel. None of these lawsuits, however, have yet risen to the Supreme Court in a way that would give the justices the necessary opening to settle longstanding disagreements about Congress’ control of the federal pursestrings — and whether the administration’s actions violate the law.

In recent weeks, several of the leading cases that have a shot at reaching the Supreme Court were set back due to two technical tripwires: Who can bring the lawsuits and what courts have to hear them first.

That means the high court’s justices are unlikely to wade into the substance of the issue, if they choose to at all, until at least next year. In the meantime, Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill will have to navigate tense funding negotiations to avoid a government shutdown on Oct. 1 and beyond without any assurances that Trump will be forced to spend the money as stipulated.

“Whatever your prediction is about when we get a full-year appropriation … we won’t have heard from the Supreme Court — in any way that anyone can count on — when that is done,” said Georgetown University law professor David Super.

For a few days last week, one prominent case challenging Trump’s withholding of funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development seemed like it might get an emergency decision by the Supreme Court in short order. That case could have sent strong signals about how the justices view the broader question of impoundment, which refers to the president’s act of withholding congressionally appropriated cash.

But on Friday, the Trump administration dropped its request for the justices to rule in the case after a lower court effectively sent the issue back before another judge.

Meanwhile, Trump added new urgency on Friday for the high court to weigh in on impoundment of foreign aid funding: He advanced his assault on Congress’ funding power by declaring a “pocket rescission,” the seldom-used maneuver to cancel federal dollars in the final days of the fiscal year without requiring an up-or-down vote.

Many lawmakers and Congress’ top watchdog argue the gambit is illegal. But the courts won’t necessarily see the “pocket rescissions” tactic championed by White House budget director Russ Vought as meaningfully different from the other actions the Trump administration has taken this year, according to Super.

“It’s a cute term that Mr. Vought came up with. But it is essentially just sitting on the money, and that’s what they’ve been doing now,” he said.

Still, Trump’s latest attempt to assert more control over federal spending has made lawmakers of both parties desperate for certainty, even as they’re jittery over the prospect that the justices could side with Trump and erode their funding power.

After all, the court has repeatedly ruled in the president’s favor of late, including allowing the Trump administration to cut off health research grants, proceed with mass layoffs at the Education Department and implement sweeping elements of his mass deportation agenda.

“I’m worried,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in an interview.

“They’re inventing what they thought was good policy,” Merkley said of the Supreme Court justices. “That’s not their role. And so they’re violating their oath of office through the Constitution. So we’re in deep trouble when this comes to the Supreme Court.”

To some lawmakers, the Supreme Court’s eventual, inevitable role in resolving these interbranch fights could be a clarifying inflection point for the nation.

“My prediction is: When we look back on this administration, there’ll be more Supreme Court decisions defining separation of powers than in the 250-year history of the country,” said Sen. Rand Paul in an interview.

The Kentucky Republican, who chairs the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee in charge of vetting Trump’s nominees to top budget posts, told a White House official earlier this year that he doesn’t think the president “can impound direct funds indefinitely.”

“It’s a reasonable question to ask. And it’s never been all the way to the Supreme Court,” Paul said. “And of course, everybody has to adhere to what the final decision will be.”

But even then, the Supreme Court could skirt the overarching argument many lawmakers are hoping the justices settle.

“The biggest question for the next few months is whether the court has the appetite to squarely take on the basic issue — the fundamental issue — which is the administration’s broad claim that it can refuse to spend appropriated funds for policy reasons,” said Gregg Nunziata, a conservative lawyer who served as counsel for Senate Republicans and now heads the Society for the Rule of Law.

Already, the Supreme Court has dealt a major setback to lawsuits over funding the Trump administration has withheld for grants and contracts. Late last month, the justices signaled such cases need to start over in the slow-moving Court of Federal Claims, which has jurisdiction over cases involving financial damages and breached contracts.

And the USAID case — in which humanitarian groups are challenging Trump’s decision to withhold billions of congressionally appropriated dollars — now faces several new twists in its path to Supreme Court consideration too.

On Friday, a White House official said the Trump administration sees revoking USAID funding as its strongest case for canceling federal cash at the end of the fiscal year, arguing, “there’s nothing that we can do within these accounts, because of the way they’re written, to shift them to things that the president would support in the foreign aid space.”

The administration “wanted to make the case as clean as we possibly could, as we navigate the different critics that we know would arise,” the official added.

Last month, in the USAID case, a panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that only Congress’ top watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, can sue the administration over breaking impoundment law. That ruling has derailed the effort by humanitarian groups to sue directly.

University of Michigan administrative law professor Nicholas Bagley described the courts as taking a “lawyerly, careful, minimalist” approach in their decisions on Trump’s funding moves. “And the vice is the courts don’t appear to be registering the full depth of the concern about the erosion of the appropriations power,” he added.

But the fact that those lower-court issues are hindering lawsuits from making it to the Supreme Court isn’t necessarily a failure of the judicial system, argues Zachary Price, a law professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco.

“It’s just a kind of mismatch between litigation timelines and the way the appropriations cycle works,” Price explained. “It’s a process that works a lot better when it’s a matter of push and pull between the branches.”

Those so far reluctant to exert real pressure on the administration to back down from its funding moves are congressional Republicans. GOP lawmakers could take steps like barring funding for White House operations if the Trump administration doesn’t spend federal cash as lawmakers mandate or reject Trump’s proposals like the $9 billion rescissions package they passed earlier this summer.

But most Republicans don’t want to appear antagonistic of the president, and they’re hoping instead that the legal system will settle a messy fight on their behalf.

“Is Congress determined to protect its own power of the purse or not?” said Philip Wallach, who studies the separation of powers at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “Congress has a very bad habit of relying on the courts to rule and make everything clear, and fix everything for them, so that they don’t have to do it.”

Congress

Sanders to rally for Troy Jackson in Maine

Published

7 hours ago

October 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Sen. Bernie Sanders will hit the road for Troy Jackson in Maine starting Oct. 10, the first time the progressive leader will stump for the candidate this cycle.

The Vermont independent plans to hold three rallies with Jackson, according to an itinerary shared first with Blue Light News: first in Bangor on Oct. 10th followed by Lewiston and Biddeford on Oct. 11.

The Maine swing will kick off Sanders’ travel for the final stretch of the midterms, covering ground throughout October for House and Senate candidates, POLITICO reported.

“Bernie and Troy know that working people built this country and deserve a government that fights for them,” Jackson spokesperson Dan Gottlieb told Blue Light News. “Susan Collins has had nearly 30 years to deliver, and working Mainers are still getting squeezed while she serves the billionaires and corporate interests who bankroll her campaigns. Mainers don’t need another six years of excuses.”

Sanders campaigned ahead of major wins for progressives in the primary season, speaking at more than 60 rallies since last year’s Fight the Oligarchy tour and endorsing more than 90 candidates up and down the ballot.

He’s also opening his substantial $23 million campaign war chest, POLITICO reported, and contributing hundreds of thousands of dollars toMinnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan’s Senate campaign and others including Angie Nixon in Florida and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison,

Sanders will return to Maine after initially backing Graham Platner’s campaign for Senate. Allegations reported by POLITICO ultimately led him to call on the Democratic nominee to drop out of the race.

Sanders had not formally endorsed Jackson since he clinched the nomination from Platner, though he previously backed Jackson’s initial run for governor.

Congress

Hill: Trump’s ‘lack of favorability’ creating challenging politics

Published

7 hours ago

October 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

House Financial Services Chair French Hill said he has “no concerns” about winning back his Arkansas seat in the upcoming midterm elections, but the six-term House member acknowledged the political headwinds for his party.

“I consider the atmosphere a very tough political environment right now because of President [Donald] Trump’s lack of favorability at the top, and you know people are concerned about, as I say, what it’s like to live under an inflated economy the last four years,” Hill said in an interview.

Hill is in a solidly red district, according to the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, and said he is up against a “weaker candidate this time than I’ve had in past races.” Polling in the district, however, has shown a tighter race. The two polls done this year placed Democratic challenger Chris Jones ahead of Hill by a few percentage points. Any perceived polling victory for Jones is still well within the margin of error, and one of the polls had a Democratic sponsor.

Stephannie Lane Baker, a spokesperson for Jones, said that “of all the Republicans in Congress, the chairman of the Financial Services Committee doesn’t get to dodge responsibility for this economy. He’s in trouble, and he knows it.”

Additionally, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker’s PAC, Ready for the Fight, committed more than $1 million in television ads through the next five weeks for Jones’ race in Arkansas’s 2nd District, Jordan Abudayyeh, a spokesperson for the PAC confirmed. Overall Democratic spending on advertising for the race was just over $1 million, primarily made up by contributions from the Ready for the Fight PAC, with Republicans spending almost $2.7 million on ad buys, according to AdImpact, an advertising tracking service.

Hill said he has addressed affordability concerns “head on” this Congress.

“My work on housing, my work on the Price Stability Act, my work to try to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse, and drop the federal budget deficit as a percentage of GDP,” Hill said. “All these things can contribute to a more affordable environment for people. So I’ve tried to make that a forefront of my campaign this year.”

Hill was a key architect of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a bipartisan housing affordability bill that became law in July. The Price Stability Act, which is unlikely to become law this year, would narrow the Federal Reserve’s current dual mandate of pursuing maximum employment and price stability to focus exclusively on containing inflation.

Congress

Sanders, AOC, Merkley propose bill to ban Flock cameras

Published

13 hours ago

October 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) on Friday released text of legislation intended to ban the use of Flock surveillance cameras and other license plate readers.

Flock has faced severe public backlash against the surveillance technology following reports that police officers misused the technology to track women, and it has the largest network of license plate readers across the U.S. Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) hosted a hearing last month probing its potential misuses, although the company’s CEO Garrett Langley did not appear.

The latest bill, unveiled Friday and named the Ban Flock Act, would bar federal agencies from using automated license plate readers or accessing data from the technology and prevent federal grants from funding states and local governments that use automated license plate readers.

“At a time of growing concern about the unchecked power of artificial intelligence, Flock is eviscerating the very notion of privacy by installing tens of thousands of cameras in communities across America without their consent,” Sanders, who has positioned himself as a leading progressive voice on AI technology, said in a statement. “We cannot allow America to become a surveillance state where a handful of AI oligarchs profit by giving the government the power to track our every movement.”

Ocasio-Cortez similarly condemned the surveillance capabilities of the technology and said the bill would “enforce our constitutional right to privacy and protect Americans from both corporate and government surveillance.”

“No one should have this unchecked surveillance power at their fingertips,” Merkley added.

Republicans have introduced similar efforts to regulate license plate readers, such as Hawley’s Stop Flock Abuse Act, which would require audits and limits on unauthorized searches.

Flock did not immediately respond to a request for comment.