Senate Parliamentarian Won’t Let Republicans Carry Water For Trump Judiciary Defiance
This is your TPM evening briefing.
Republicans in Congress have been looking for ways to codify some of the Trump administration’s various efforts to take a sledgehammer to the separation of powers and defy the judiciary since courts first began blocking some of his most legally dubious executive actions and DOGE cuts.
The legislators’ efforts have taken a few different forms. Earlier this year, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent a letter to the House Appropriations Committee asking the panel to consider, essentially, cutting off funds to certain federal judges who rule against the Trump administration, or temporarily block policies by issuing nationwide injunctions.
“We got money, spending, the appropriations process to help try to address some of this,” Jordan told reporters back in March, after acknowledging he had been speaking with GOP appropriators about “legislative remedies” to respond to the courts checking Trump policies.
An excerpt from his March 31 letter to the committee, which had just begun the work of crafting the bipartisan funding bills that Congress will need to pass to fund the government once the CR runs out in September:
We respectfully urge the Appropriations Committee to consider including language in the upcoming funding bills to address the abusive use of nationwide injunctions while also ensuring the federal judiciary can continue to operate effectively and responsibly with respect to its growing civil and criminal dockets. In particular, we urge you to consider language prohibiting the use of taxpayer dollars and federal resources to issue or enforce these overbroad injunctions beyond the specific parties in front of an issuing court in a particular case. Additionally, we ask that you consider including language to limit appropriated funds related to the issuance and enforcement of nationwide injunctions, including using court resources to compel compliance, impose fines, or conduct contempt proceedings related to such injunctions.
This was just one of several actions taken by legislators that set off alarm bells in the early months of Trump’s second term, particularly in the wake of an onslaught of executive actions and lawless freezes on federal spending by DOGE. At the time, House Republicans were also mulling holding hearings on whether to try to impeach U.S. District Judge James Boasberg for his efforts to check the Trump administration on its at-the-time unprecedented due process violations.
By mid-April, House Republicans had also passed a bill put forward by Rep. Darrel Issa (R-CA) meant to place limits on some judges’ authority to issue nationwide injunctions, though it has not been taken up by the Senate.
Elements of this effort to help Trump go after the judiciary made their way into the reconciliation package the Senate is expected to soon bring forward for a vote. But just yesterday, the Senate Parliamentarian ruled against some of the provisions House and Senate Republicans are trying to shove through in their sweeping “big beautiful bill.” Here’s a description of the specifics, per the New York Times:
The measure would target the preliminary injunctions and temporary restraining orders issued by federal judges on Mr. Trump’s directives. Those rulings have halted or delayed orders on a host of policies, including efforts to carry out mass firings of federal workers and to withhold funds from states that do not comply with demands on immigration enforcement.
The G.O.P. proposal would require parties suing over federal policies to post a bond covering the government’s potential costs and damages from an injunction if the judge’s order were found later to have been wrongly granted.
Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, who is tasked with determining whether there are any aspects of the legislation that break Senate rules for reconciliation (meaning the bill can be passed with just 50 votes instead of 60), ruled on Sunday that that specific provision on judicial funding doesn’t meet the requirements.
“Senate Republicans tried to write Donald Trump’s contempt for the courts into law — gutting judicial enforcement, defying the Constitution, and bulldozing the very rule of law that forms our democracy,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement. “It was nothing short of an assault on the system of checks and balances that has anchored this nation since its founding.”
White House Thinks Its Found A Way To Get Around Impoundment Control Act
Ever since Elon Musk’s tech-world buddies and Russ Vought’s Project 2025 buddies took the executive branch by storm and began slashing funding for government programs willy nilly, a question has loomed over their endeavor: How will they get around the Nixon-era Impoundment Control Act (ICA) and other statutes that give Congress, and Congress alone, the power to approve government spending.
Last month, the White House floated a trial balloon — it sent a rescissions package that contained a small portion of DOGE’s cuts to foreign aid, tossing in the defunding of NPR and PBS as well. In theory, the Republican-controlled Congress would rubber-stamp this rescissions bill and make DOGE’s work in these areas constitutionally sound. In practice, the package faced some friction in the House and is running into more in the Senate. It is time limited, and if the Senate fails to approve it within 45 days — by July 18th — the White House will need to start over with a new rescissions package.
Except, what if it didn’t? Vought and friends present their deus es machina: Pocket rescissions. Here’s how the Vought-founded Center for Renewing America describes the maneuver:
A “pocket” rescission is a standard rescission, similar to the process described above, that occurs when the president sends his rescission message to Congress with fewer than forty-five days left in the fiscal year (which ends on September 30) and then opts to withhold or pause the obligations within the message. Importantly, in this instance, the fiscal year ends before the forty-five-day statutory period for the executive branch to withhold the obligations expires. Therefore, any budget authority for funds that expires at the end of the fiscal year within the rescission lapses automatically.
In essence, it is a way, these conservatives contend, for the president to announce cuts — potentially sweeping cuts! — within days of the end of the fiscal year, and have those cuts loopholed into law. But the plan is, in the words of the New York Times, “legally untested.” The Government Accountability Office, a watchdog within the legislative branch, put it more bluntly in 2018, stating clearly that the Impoundment Control Act “does not permit the withholding of funds through their date of expiration.” In fact, nothing in our system of governance suggests such a maneuver is doable, the GAO continued:
The statutory text and legislative history of the ICA, Supreme Court case law, and the overarching constitutional framework of the legislative and executive powers provide no basis to interpret the ICA as a mechanism by which the President may unilaterally abridge the enacted period of availability of a fixed-period appropriation.
The Trump administration has not been shy about its eagerness to put these issues before today’s very conservative Supreme Court, and we look to be headed there — perhaps by way of pocket rescissions.
— John Light
Sean Hannity Helps Trump Spread Iran Disinfo
WIRED has a new story out today on the disinformation that Trump is spreading, lifted from rando social media accounts rather than sharing actual information from his own military officials. And Fox News host Sean Hannity is helping him do it.
WIRED: Donald Trump and Sean Hannity Set Off a Wave of Disinformation After Iran Bombing
But rather than relying on information from his own intelligence agencies, satellite imagery, or on-the-ground reporting, Trump instead posted on Truth Social a screenshot of an X post from an anonymous account that claims to conduct open source intelligence investigations.
“Fordow is gone,” the account, which lists the website of a Zionist clothing company in its biography, wrote, providing no further information. Trump followed this up by claiming in a press conference that Fordow had been “completely and totally obliterated.”
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