The Dictatorship
Even Republicans oppose Trump’s latest budget stunt
U.S. District Judge Amir Ali’s decision could not have been clearer: “There is not a plausible interpretation of the statutes,” he wrote“that would justify the billions of dollars they plan to withhold.” The word “they” referred to the State Department and, more importantly, President Donald Trump, who is trying yet another way to ignore budget laws. The administration’s latest tactic is what’s called a pocket rescission. Even Republicans have called this an “attempt to undermine the law,” as the White House impounds funds — ironically — by abusing a law called the Impoundment Control Act.
When Congress passes a law and it’s enacted, it’s then the president’s job to carry out that law. If the president doesn’t like the law, he can veto it or else ask Congress to amend or repeal it. Simple enough. What a president can’t do is sign something into law and then immediately ignore parts of it. But that’s exactly what Trump is doing.
Any effort to rescind appropriated funds without congressional approval is a clear violation of the law.”
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine
The president and his budget director, Russell Voughthave argued that spending laws are optional, and that the president always has the power to sign spending into law and then choose to not do it. Trump and Vought insist, for instance, that a law funding $47 billion of cutting-edge cancer and other biomedical research is optional — that the president can only spend half of the money, instead of vetoing it and demanding Congress send him a bill with only half as much money.
The act of not using all the money the legislative branch has passed — or pausing the money altogether — is called impoundment. Under the Impoundment Control Act (ICA), the president is allowed to ask Congress to rescind funds — to pare back unused money. Where otherwise allowed, the president may freeze funds for 45 days while Congress considers the president’s request.
The Trump White House incorrectly argues it has the right to pause any funds included in that rescissions request no matter what — even if pausing them for 45 days would lead to that money lapsing, being no longer usable since the time in which it was allowed to be used had run out. At the end of AugustTrump and his team decided to send up a new rescissions request with the stated intent of letting the funding lapse.
That’s called a pocket rescission and it’s what Trump just did with another $4.9 billion of foreign aid. Under Trump and Vought’s argument, even if Congress votes down the request, the executive branch can still pause the money for 45 days until it lapses.
This is illegal. In a 2018 reportthe Government Accountability Office concluded that “the statutory text and legislative history of the ICA, Supreme Court case law, and the overarching constitutional framework of legislative and executive powers provide no basis” for Trump and Vought’s interpretation. In case that wasn’t clear enough, a GAO blog post from August answered the question “Are pocket rescissions legal?” simply and without hesitation: “No.”
Even Republican lawmakers have criticized the administration’s move. “Any effort to rescind appropriated funds without congressional approval is a clear violation of the law,” Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, saidwhile Its. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, Said“I strongly object to the Office of Management and Budget’s unlawful attempt to pursue a nearly $5 billion pocket rescission.”
On Wednesday, Judge Ali issued an injunction, requiring the White House to spend roughly $12 billion in congressionally appropriated foreign aid before the end of the month. Late Friday, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals denied the Justice Department’s request to stay the injunction. The case will eventually end up at the Supreme Court. There, the justices will finally rule on whether the president is an appropriations king — whether he can unilaterally ignore budget laws and arbitrarily cut spending programs without congressional approval. The White House’s argument is that there’s no law Congress can pass that actually guarantees funding, that it’s all optional, up to the whims of the president. If the Supreme Court were to green-light this, it would put at risk everything in the government that the American people rely on.
But in a very real sense, there’s no difference between a pocket rescission and any other impoundment. Whether a program is included in the formal rescissions request or is being quietly impounded, either way the money doesn’t get spent. The pocket rescission is just a beacon meant to draw our attention. Trump wants us to focus on the foreign aid impoundments — a shiny object he’s illegally deleting via a pocket rescission — so that we forget about the quiet impoundments of cancer research and preschool funding. Taken together, Trump is now attempting seemingly the most expansive, illegal set of budgetary actions of any president in U.S. history.
Bobby Kogan is the senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress.
The Dictatorship
Airport lines grow longer — and Congress can’t even agree if DHS shutdown talks exist
It’s been nearly a month since thousands of Department of Homeland Security employees were forced to begin working without pay, and the negotiations to overhaul and fund the department haven’t yielded any meaningful progress.
In fact, talks have moved so slowly that lawmakers are now publicly arguing over whether negotiations even exist.
Lengthening TSA lines, dwindling disaster aid funds and rejected proposals to fund portions of the department have forced lawmakers to acknowledge they’re nowhere close to a deal.
“If Democrats won’t sit down with us, it’s showing you who’s playing you right now,” Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., told reporters Tuesday. “They’re playing you.”
Britt said she’s sought meetings with Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, and has been rebuffed.
Murray said she’s willing to negotiate, but President Donald Trump’s White House needs to acknowledge it has to change tactics at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as Democrats seek requirements for agents to wear body cameras, remove masks and cooperate with state and local investigations, among other things.
“I am willing to talk to people, but I’m not willing to sit in a room, have coffee, give away a few things and have Stephen Miller override whatever we all agreed to in a room,” Murray said on the Senate floor Wednesday.
Murray sought agreement on the Senate floor to pass a bill to fund most of the department, excluding funds for ICE, Customs and Border Protection and the secretary’s office, which Britt objected to.
That leaves the TSA, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Coast Guard and other agencies running on fumes, as pressure builds on lawmakers.
FEMA was projected to have about $5.9 billion left in its Disaster Relief Fund at the end of February and $2.1 billion left at the end of this month, according to its latest report. Those funds were projected to run out before the end of April.
TSA wait times have varied widely as employees work without pay. On Wednesday afternoon, the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport posted TSA wait times of 40 minutes at its main terminal. But Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, another major hub, posted wait times between 0 and 10 minutes at its terminals. Meanwhile, over the weekend, wait times in Houston and New Orleans were as long as three hours.
The ouster of Kristi Noem as Homeland Security secretary, and the selection of Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., as the new nominee, hasn’t won over Democrats. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said ICE needs to be overhauled legislatively, and not just a change in personnel.
“The president has fired Kristi Noem. Good riddance,” Schumer said last week when Mullin was named as the new nominee. “But the problems at this agency, at ICE, transcend any one person. The rot is deep.”
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., a Republican who helped push Noem out of her position — citing over-the-top mass deportations, mismanagement of disaster responses and her decision to kill her dog — said he’s not sure Mullin will change the negotiations over DHS funding.
He said he expects Mullin to “have a transformative impact on FEMA.” But Tillis said he still wants answers about ICE operations in North Carolina, which Noem didn’t answer.
“I just want to demonstrate that this mass deportation idea was a bad idea because it was quantity over quality — quality of really bad people that need to be incarcerated or deported, or hopefully deported and incarcerated in whatever country they came from,” Tillis told MS NOW Wednesday.
It’s been nearly two weeks since the White House last sent Democrats an offer in the ICE negotiations. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters Wednesday that Democrats still hadn’t responded to the latest GOP offer.
Thune said Republicans aren’t going to agree to a funding bill that cuts out money for ICE and CBP.
“You take away border security — I can’t imagine wanting to do that,” he said. “This bill needs to move together.”
The spat over funding other agencies only highlighted the chasm between the two parties on policy changes at ICE and CBP.
“We are not going to defund the police,” Britt said of Murray’s proposal to fund other agencies. “We are not going back to Biden’s open borders.”
Murray pushed back, contending it’s “absurd” to say Democrats are defunding the police. She noted that ICE and CBP received billions of dollars in last year’s Republican reconciliation bill — money that’s still available during the shutdown.
After the tense exchange on the Senate floor Wednesday, Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, said it’s clear lawmakers have a long way to go.
“We are not that close,” Schatz said. “And so if everybody agrees on that, that we’re not that close, that it’s not like negotiations have shut down, but they’re a little stalled.”
Jack Fitzpatrick covers Congress for MS NOW. He previously reported for Bloomberg Government, Morning Consult and National Journal. He has bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Arizona State University.
Three brothers were arrested Wednesday in a weekend bombing at the U.S. Embassy in Oslowhich Norwegian police are treating as a possible act of terrorism.
Authorities said the men, who have not been publicly identified, are Norwegian citizens “with a background from Iraq.” They are all in their 20s.
Officials earlier said Sunday’s explosion caused limited damage to the structure and no injuries. Prime Minister Jonas Store called the attack “very serious and completely unacceptable.”
Investigators said they have not determined a motive but had not ruled out terrorism.
“It’s natural to see this in the context of the current security situation and that this could be an attack deliberately targeting the U.S. Embassy,” Oslo police official Frode Larsen said shortly after the explosionreferring to the U.S.-Israel war with Iran.
U.S. embassies and consulates around the world, particularly in Gulf countries caught in the crossfire, have been on high alert since the war with Iranbegan Feb. 28. The U.S. ordered the departure of nonemergency government personnel and families from missions in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Iraq and Oman. Suspected Iranian drones struck the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabiaand the U.S. Consulate in Dubailast week. The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad was also targeted in a rocket attackSaturday.
Shortly after the bombing in Oslo, shots were fired at the exterior of the U.S. Consulate in Toronto, Canada, on Tuesday.
The State Department did not immediately respond to MS NOW’s request for comment on the Oslo arrests.
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW, with a focus on how global events and foreign policy shape U.S. politics. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.
Today’s edition of quick hits.
* All eyes on the Strait of Hormuz: “Leaders from the coalition of G7 countries — which is made up of the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom — met virtually today to discuss how to ease the economic strain caused by the Iran war, including the possibility of escorting ships through the Strait of Hormuz with military assets.”
* In related news: “Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said it struck two ships in the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday, as the war disrupts one of the world’s most crucial economic passageways and threatens industries across the globe.”
* A case I’ve been following: “The U.S. must keep making payments on the $16 billion New York Hudson Tunnel, after an appeals court on Wednesday rejected the Trump administration’s bid to halt paying for the project.”
* All of the latest inflation data was collected before the war: “Prices consumers pay for a broad range of goods and services rose in line with expectations for February, offering a final look at inflation pressures before an oil shock tied to the Iran war rattled the outlook. The consumer price index increased a seasonally adjusted 0.3% for the month, putting the 12-month inflation rate at 2.4%, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data released Wednesday. Both numbers matched the Dow Jones consensus forecast.”
* The Epstein files: “On the heels of news reports that more than 40,000 files were either withheld or taken down from the Department of Justice’s site with documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein case, the DOJ late last week released documents including FBI memos related to accusations against President Donald Trump. But MS NOW has found that the released files still appear to be incomplete, missing FBI notes and memos reflecting interviews with women alleging abuse by other prominent men.”
* In related news: “The anonymous artists who have targeted President Donald Trump with satirical statues and installations in Washington struck again on the National Mall on Tuesday morning with an enormous statue of the president embracing the deceased convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in a reenactment of a famous scene from the movie ‘Titanic.’”
* Bringing more guns to more convicted criminals: “The Trump administration quietly restored the gun rights to 22 people who had lost them because of felonies, indictments or other convictions this year as it prepares to revive a long-dormant program that’s expected to draw a tsunami of applications.”
* This proposal seems entirely worthwhile: “Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) is introducing new legislation Wednesday to recover federal money that’s been paid out to U.S. presidents through settlements resulting from White House coercion. Here’s a copy of his billfirst obtained by HuffPost. In case it’s not obvious, the legislation is directly aimed at President Donald Trump.”
See you tomorrow.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
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