{"id":12829,"date":"2025-09-02T08:46:41","date_gmt":"2025-09-02T08:46:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/congress-hankers-for-closure-in-funding-war-with-trump-scotus-is-slow-to-deliver\/"},"modified":"2025-09-02T08:46:41","modified_gmt":"2025-09-02T08:46:41","slug":"congress-hankers-for-closure-in-funding-war-with-trump-scotus-is-slow-to-deliver","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/congress-hankers-for-closure-in-funding-war-with-trump-scotus-is-slow-to-deliver\/","title":{"rendered":"Congress hankers for closure in funding war with Trump. SCOTUS is slow to deliver."},"content":{"rendered":"
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Lawmakers have been waiting all year for the Supreme Court to save them from President Donald Trump\u2019s unprecedented moves to suspend funding Congress already approved. But they might not get closure anytime soon.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019 control of the federal pursestrings \u2014 and whether the administration\u2019s actions violate the law.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

That means the high court\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhatever your prediction is about when we get a full-year appropriation \u2026 we won\u2019t have heard from the Supreme Court \u2014 in any way that anyone can count on \u2014 when that is done,\u201d said Georgetown University law professor David Super.<\/p>\n

For a few days last week, one prominent case<\/u><\/a> challenging Trump\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

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

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\u2019 funding power by declaring a \u201cpocket rescission,\u201d the seldom-used maneuver to cancel federal dollars in the final days of the fiscal year<\/u><\/a> without requiring an up-or-down vote.<\/p>\n

Many lawmakers and Congress\u2019 top watchdog argue the gambit is illegal. But the courts won\u2019t necessarily see the \u201cpocket rescissions\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’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,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

Still, Trump\u2019s latest attempt to assert more control over federal spending has made lawmakers of both parties desperate for certainty, even as they\u2019re jittery over the prospect that the justices could side with Trump and erode their funding power.<\/p>\n

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<\/u><\/a>, proceed with mass layoffs<\/u><\/a> at the Education Department and implement sweeping elements of his mass deportation agenda.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m worried,\u201d Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in an interview.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey’re inventing what they thought was good policy,\u201d Merkley said of the Supreme Court justices. \u201cThat’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.\u201d<\/p>\n

To some lawmakers, the Supreme Court\u2019s eventual, inevitable role in resolving these interbranch fights could be a clarifying inflection point for the nation.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy 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,\u201d said Sen. Rand Paul in an interview.<\/p>\n

The Kentucky Republican, who chairs the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee in charge of vetting Trump\u2019s nominees to top budget posts, told a White House official<\/a> earlier this year that he doesn\u2019t think the president \u201ccan impound direct funds indefinitely.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s a reasonable question to ask. And it’s never been all the way to the Supreme Court,\u201d Paul said. \u201cAnd of course, everybody has to adhere to what the final decision will be.\u201d<\/p>\n

But even then, the Supreme Court could skirt the overarching argument many lawmakers are hoping the justices settle.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe biggest question for the next few months is whether the court has the appetite to squarely take on the basic issue \u2014 the fundamental issue \u2014 which is the administration’s broad claim that it can refuse to spend appropriated funds for policy reasons,\u201d said Gregg Nunziata, a conservative lawyer who served as counsel for Senate Republicans and now heads the Society for the Rule of Law.<\/p>\n

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<\/u><\/a> in the slow-moving Court of Federal Claims, which has jurisdiction over cases involving financial damages and breached contracts.<\/p>\n

And the USAID case \u2014 in which humanitarian groups are challenging Trump\u2019s decision to withhold billions of congressionally appropriated dollars \u2014 now faces several new twists in its path to Supreme Court consideration too.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cthere\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

The administration \u201cwanted to make the case as clean as we possibly could, as we navigate the different critics that we know would arise,\u201d the official added.<\/p>\n

Last month, in the USAID case, a panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that only Congress\u2019 top watchdog<\/u><\/a>, the Government Accountability Office, can sue the administration over breaking impoundment law. That ruling has derailed the effort by humanitarian groups to sue directly.<\/p>\n

University of Michigan administrative law professor Nicholas Bagley described the courts as taking a \u201clawyerly, careful, minimalist\u201d approach in their decisions on Trump\u2019s funding moves. \u201cAnd the vice is the courts don’t appear to be registering the full depth of the concern about the erosion of the appropriations power,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

But the fact that those lower-court issues are hindering lawsuits from making it to the Supreme Court isn\u2019t necessarily a failure of the judicial system, argues Zachary Price, a law professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s just a kind of mismatch between litigation timelines and the way the appropriations cycle works,\u201d Price explained. \u201cIt’s a process that works a lot better when it’s a matter of push and pull between the branches.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019t spend federal cash as lawmakers mandate or reject Trump\u2019s proposals like the $9 billion rescissions package they passed earlier this summer.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs Congress determined to protect its own power of the purse or not?\u201d said Philip Wallach, who studies the separation of powers at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. \u201cCongress 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lawmakers have been waiting all year for the Supreme Court to save them from President Donald Trump\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12829"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12829\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}