Nancy Pelosi just got some very bad news. Look, here is the sad truth about American politics – our leaders are cowards who too easily bend to whims of the day.
Congress is particularly guilty of this and the result has been a steady erosion of Congressional power and a steady accumulation of executive power.
Both sides have created this situation and both sides profited from it but now that Trump wants to use the same system to help the average America, the establishment is horrified.
So they sued to stop Trump. Thankfully a Trump appointed judge just hit them with a brutal dose of reality, in essence, saying – the courts are not political so stop using them to fight TRump and do your job and use Congress.
From Fox News: Washington, D.C., district court Judge Trevor McFadden threw out House Democrats’ lawsuit seeking an injunction against President Trump’s emergency border wall funding reallocation, saying that the matter is fundamentally a political dispute and that the politicians lack standing to make the case.
Trump had declared a national emergency this past February over the humanitarian crisis at the southern border, following Congress’ failure to fund his border wall legislatively. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and House Democrats then filed suit in April, charging that Trump was “stealing from appropriated funds” by moving $6.7 billion toward border wall construction.
Democrats argued that the White House had “flouted the fundamental separation-of-powers principles and usurped for itself legislative power specifically vested by the Constitution in Congress.” But, in his ruling, McFadden, a Trump appointee, suggested Democrats were trying to usurp the political process.
“This case presents a close question about the appropriate role of the Judiciary in resolving disputes between the other two branches of the Federal Government. To be clear, the court does not imply that Congress may never sue the Executive to protect its powers,” McFadden wrote in his opinion. “The Court declines to take sides in this fight between the House and the President.”
McFadden emphasized that under the so-called “political question doctrine” and existing Supreme Court precedent, courts generally stay out of politically sensitive matters best left to voters. And, he noted that House Democrats had the burden of demonstrating that they had standing — a difficult hurdle for any plaintiff to clear, which involves showing a particularized injury that the court can address.
Especially in the context of political questions involving legislators, McFadden asserted, the availability of other “institutional remedies” — actions prescribed by the constitution besides litigation — counseled against finding that Democrats had standing.
For example, McFadden noted Democrats had various other methods with which to pursue their objectives legislatively. The Trump administration argued in its brief that when Congress was concerned about “unauthorized Executive Branch spending in the aftermath of World War I, it responded not by threatening litigation, but by creating the General Accounting Office” — an argument the judge cited appprovingly in his opinion.
“Congress has several political arrows in its quiver to counter perceived threats to its sphere of power,” McFadden wrote. “These tools show that this lawsuit is not a last resort for the House. And this fact is also exemplified by the many other cases across the country challenging the administration’s planned construction of the border wall.”
McFadden quoted former Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion in the seminal 1803 case Marbury v. Madison, in which Marshall wrote, the “province of the [C[ourt is, solely, to decide on the rights of individuals, not to enquire how the executive, or executive officers, perform duties in which they have a discretion.”
