Supreme Court Will Make King Trump Pay USAID's Bills For Now, And Alito Is MAAAAAD
These judges with their ... judging!
The good news: the Supreme Court has stepped in to force the State Department to disperse $2 billion in USAID funds for work that has already been done, in the case of Those Assholes v. The AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition and the Global Health Council.
The bad news: a ruling that should have been an obvious 9-0 was 5-4, with Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh dissenting. And Samuel Alito wrote an eight-page screed insisting that Donald Trump IS SO TOO sovereign immune, as you might expect!
This is not to be confused with the other USAID lawsuit, filed by unions representing federal employees and members of the foreign service, which challenged Trump’s right to dismantle entire departments that Congress has made; that injunction was denied. Today’s case was pay the money you owe for the work you already got, motherfryers.
You’ll recall USAID was the first thing Elon Musk’s Incel Clown Posse DOGE threw into the “woodchipper” after Trump issued an executive order putting a 90-day pause on “foreign development assistance.” DOGE (or somebody) blocked payments that caused immediate deaths, including a four-year-old boy in Uganda, stranded workers overseas with no way to get back home, left 500,000 tons of food to spoil and fucked over American farmers in the process. ‘MURICA!
On January 28 Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a waiver for humanitarian assistance, but the money remained frozen anyway. And the administration froze 5,800 projects financed by USAID, even the ones that got a Li’l’ Marco waiver. Then Rubio fired Nicholas Enrich, the acting assistant administrator for Global Health at USAID for blowing the whistle on the massive amount of disease and death that cutting the funding will cause, and the chaotic, contradictory instructions that employees had gotten for filing waivers. He also fired the USAID inspector general, Paul Martin, for having the audacity to warn the government that USAID had lost almost all ability to track $8.2 billion in unspent humanitarian aid, leaving the money vulnerable to being co-opted by whoever might gain access now that no one was there guarding the henhouse.
The AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition and the Global Health Council sued under the Administrative Procedure Act, and on February 13, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia entered a temporary restraining order directing the State Department to unpause and pay its bills with the money that Congress had already allocated. But Trump ran to the Supreme Court hours before the disbursements were supposed to happen, and on February 25, Roberts let the pause keep pausing while the Supremes took their sweet time to mull it all over.
So, it’s nice that at least five justices believe Trump is not a Holy God Emperor who can ignore Congress, and surprising that Amy Coney Barrett was one of them. But wow is Alito’s bullshit a piece of work! His fussing:
Does a single district-court judge who likely lacks jurisdiction have the unchecked power to compel the Government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever) 2 billion taxpayer dollars? The answer to that question should be an emphatic “No,” but a majority of this Court apparently thinks otherwise. I am stunned. [...] As a result, the Government must apparently pay the $2 billion posthaste—not because the law requires it, but simply because a District Judge so ordered.
He is stunned! Nobody tell Sam Alito that ordering stuff is what judges do at their jobs all day, he might never become one!
Does he think that only the Supreme Court has the power to tell a government agency to pay the bills that Congress has allocated money for, and otherwise the government can just demand work and stiff contractors with a see ya, suckers? Apparently! Bush, Trump, Obama and Biden had 96 nationwide injunctions issued against them by district courts. Student loan debt relief! Restrictions on how the government can communicate with social media companies! Ken Paxton suing over the words “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” getting added to Title IX! But this is apparently the first time Alito has ever heard of such a sovereign-immunity-sullying outrage.
And for whatever reason Alito seems obsessed with the figure of $2 billion. Yet no concern about how nearly four times that amount is now out there with no one to oversee it, and is vulnerable to winding up in the pockets of Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas or whoever.
Well, at least USAID contractors will get their bills paid now, unless Trump decides to simply ignore the Supreme Court and flash-fly that constitutional crisis that he and his squealing toady JD Vance insists they’ve both been itching for like Andrew Jackson with a case of the pinworms.
In 2021 Vance told a podcaster, “fire every single mid level bureaucrat, [and] every civil servant in the administrative state … and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’” He expanded on that jive later:
Like, you need the bureaucracy to be responsive to the elected branches of government. The counterargument is, you know, ‘Aren’t you promoting a constitutional crisis?’ And my response is no — I’m recognizing a constitutional crisis. If the elected president says, ‘I get to control the staff of my own government,’ and the Supreme Court steps in and says, ‘You’re not allowed to do that’ — like, that is the constitutional crisis. It’s not whatever Trump or whoever else does in response. When the Supreme Court tells the president he can’t control the government anymore, we need to be honest about what’s actually going on.
Checks and balances, like it says in the Constitution, is what’s supposed to be going on, you nonce. Congress’s job to deciding where the money gets spent is the other thing! Now go buy some pants that reach your ankles.
And when a HuffPost reporter asked Trump on the plane en route to the Super Bowl if he agreed with the lyrical stylings of Butthair McGenius, Trump blew up and then barred the reporter from future flights.
So what next, who knows! Today it’s a small victory, but we’ll take it.
Constitutional Crisis Showdown, let’s get ready to ruuuuuuumblllllllle!
I guess I should be thankful (I’m certainly surprised, in any event) that the court would dare exercise their Constitutional duty to be a balance on the orange king, but the follow-through is going to be the most telling as to whether the foundational rules of the US will hold any further.
Archivists Recreate Pre-Trump CDC Website, Are Hosting It in Europe
https://www.404media.co/archivists-recreate-pre-trump-cdc-website-are-hosting-it-in-europe/