A Judge Calls Out Trump’s Self-Dealing
Order in Trump $10B IRS suit threatens to expose the administration's series of collusive lawsuits.
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Donald Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS has taken a dramatic turn that nevertheless is easy to miss.
The Department of Justice has not even responded to Trump’s grandiose complaint. Its first filing was a consent motion for a 90-day extension of time.
But U.S. District Judge Kathleen M. Williams of the Southern District of Florida looked at that pedestrian motion and perceived an immense potential problem. It’s a problem that goes to the federal courts’ power to be involved in the case at all, and that could cast a shadow on other cases that we have considered to be all stitched up, including the phony-baloney $1.25 million settlement that the DOJ recently reached with Michael Flynn.
Rather than rule on the motion for an extension of time, Williams issued an order requiring both parties to brief by May 20th, and appear for a hearing May 27th. The topic is a threshold constitutional question that has been hiding in plain sight for months: whether this lawsuit presents a genuine “case or controversy” under Article III, or whether the parties are so aligned with each other that federal courts lack jurisdiction to hear it at all.
It’s a problem I have been writing about and talking about since February — what I have called “jumping the v.”
The order puts the DOJ and the administration between a rock and a hard place. It needs to argue either 1) that it is genuinely opposed to Trump, a position that the record belies, or 2) that the court nevertheless has power to act, a position that the Constitution belies.
The problem for DOJ is that since assuming the top job, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has subordinated his constitutional responsibility to act in the public interest to the one he takes as paramount: carrying out whatever Trump desires.
Now, as a result of Judge Williams’s order, he faces a stark choice: claim he will repent and actually do his job, or play an open hand and admit he will do Trump’s bidding regardless of what the Constitution requires.
