Latest in Executive Power
A federal judge on Aug. 20 threw out President Trump’s effort to block the Manhattan district attorney from subpoenaing his financial records.
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Three protesters accused members of the Trump administration of violating their First, Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights, as well as the Posse Comitatus Act, in a complaint filed in D.C. federal court On June 11, 2020. Seeking relief under Bivens and the Posse Comitatus Act, the protesters allege that while demonstrating peacefully in Lafayette Square they were sprayed with tear gar and hit with rubber bullets so the president could clear the crowd and attend a photo-op at a nearby church.
Democratic members of Congress today released the transcript of an interview conducted last week with former State Department Inspector General Steve Linick, who was abruptly fired last month.
On Friday, President Donald Trump sign a memorandum under the Defense Production Act ordering the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services to "use any and all authority available under the Act to require General Motors Company to accept, perform, and prioritize contracts or orders for the number of ventilators that the Secretary determines to be appropriate." The memorandum is pursuant to an executive order signed by the president on March 18.
Congress has told the Trump administration that it has to produce a public war powers report by March 1. And if that doesn’t happen, private citizens can now sue over it.
The House of Representatives has filed its brief before the Supreme Court in the consolidated cases Donald J. Trump v. Mazars USA, LLP, et al and Donald J. Trump v. Deutsche Bank AG, et al, regarding whether the court should invalidate four subpoenas to the companies from three separate House committees regarding President Trump's financial and business reports. The committees ask the court to affirm the lower courts' judgments that the House can issue the subpoenas, and argue that, "Many momentous separation-of-powers disputes have come before this Court . . .
New York District Attorney Cyrus Vance filed a brief to the Supreme Court in the case seeking the enforcement of a grand jury subpoena for President Trump’s financial records as part of an investigation into potential financial and tax-related crimes. The brief argues that the president’s Article II immunity extends only to official acts and provides no immunity for private conduct, and that “immunity from investigation for private conduct runs counter to precedent, the structure and operation of the Constitution, and the bedrock principle that no person is above the law.”
The Millard Fillmore administration’s diplomatic machinations toward Hawaii are a curious example of the executive branch regarding itself as constitutionally empowered to threaten war but constrained from unilaterally carrying out that threat.
A judge in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas ruled that President Donald Trump's border wall emergency proclamation, which gave the adminstration the ability to use funding for other activities to pay for construction of the border wall, was unlawful. The ruling also permanently enjoined the heads of the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of the Interior and the Treasury Department from using emergency construction funds for the wall other than those appropriated by Congress in the 2019 Consolidated Appropriations Act.