The Federalist By: Margot Cleveland
For a solid week, blue states, labor unions, and non-profit organizations have descended on federal courts up and down the East Coast seeking to halt President Donald Trump’s agenda. And they have found receptive partners in a handful of federal judges willing to enter temporary restraining orders, or TROs, to immediately — and sometimes without any notice — prohibit the normal functioning of the executive branch.
To be clear, the TROs entered are not addressing specific disputes between Trump and the litigants, where the plaintiffs allege a particular action injures them in some concrete way. Rather, the country is seeing large coalitions of plaintiffs who oppose the president’s agenda filing lawsuits challenging the broad policies and the management of the executive branch.
Consider, for instance the lawsuit more than twenty states, led by New York, filed in a federal court in Rhode Island: In that case, New York v. Trump, the states initially challenged an Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Directive to agencies to temporarily pause activities and disbursement of federal funds that conflict with various executive orders. The OMB later rescinded that directive. Yet federal judge John J. McConnell, Jr., a Barack Obama appointee, entered a TRO ordering the President of the United States not to “pause, freeze, impede, block, cancel, or terminate” federal financial assistance to the states.
The Trump Administration read that TRO as only prohibiting the freezing or canceling of grants based on the challenged OMB Directive or the president’s various executive orders. Surely the federal agencies could continue to review various grants as is always the executive’s prerogative?
Not according to an order Judge McConnell entered yesterday in response to a motion the states filed to enforce the TRO…
READ FULL ARTICLE HERE… (thefederalist.com)
Home | Caravan to Midnight (zutalk.com)
Be First to Comment