Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. When we left off last week, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali had stopped short of holding Trump administration officials in contempt. But the Biden-appointed judge this week gave them a deadline of midnight Wednesday to pay out congressionally approved funds for already completed aid work. Instead, the government went to the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice John Roberts saved them from having to comply that night, temporarily pausing Ali’s demand.
“[A]n emergency of its own making” is how plaintiff groups who sued over the freeze described the Trump administration’s high court bid. Citing the government’s “continued noncompliance” with Ali’s temporary restraining order that he issued back on Feb. 13, they said officials shouldn’t even be able to appeal the judge’s latest order that simply mandates compliance with his restraining order. And they highlighted the human stakes of the freeze, noting the “financial turmoil” caused by the government “forcing thousands of American businesses and nonprofits to suspend their work, and by halting disbursements for work that they had already performed, even work that already had been reviewed by the government and cleared for payment.”
How long will Roberts’ temporary funds freeze win for Trump last? We’re waiting on an answer heading into the weekend as the toll of the administration’s actions and inactions mount. “With Americans out of work, businesses ruined, food rotting, and critical medical care withheld, … the public interest weighs heavily against the government,” the plaintiff groups wrote in their high court filing, urging Roberts and his colleagues to let Ali’s order take effect. They implored the justices to rule “as quickly as possible to lift the administrative stay so as to prevent ongoing irreparable harm to respondents and the communities that depend on their work.”
Elsewhere on the SCOTUS docket, there was “radical agreement” during a hearing over a straight woman’s discrimination appeal. Justice Neil Gorsuch’s characterization underscored a likely victory for Marlean Ames, who said she was improperly passed over and demoted in favor of a lesbian and a gay man. The issue is whether so-called majority-group plaintiffs like Ames have a greater burden when bringing discrimination claims. It sounds like the court will say “no,” but we’ll see what happens when the opinion comes, likely by July.
In more divided action, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito were on the losing end of important cases this week. They dissented from the court’s refusal to reconsider a 25-year-old precedent approving “buffer zones” that shield people near abortion clinics. And they dissented from a win for death row prisoner Richard Glossip, who had unusual support from Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general, who admitted there was prosecutorial misconduct in his case.
As it happens, Eric Adams just claimed prosecutorial misconduct in his legal saga, which has likewise seen the defense and the prosecution in rare agreement. New York’s mayor escalated the drama this week, when he made the misconduct claim in asking a judge to dismiss his corruption case with prejudice. That’s what a defendant would typically want, but the Democrat previously agreed with the Trump Justice Department to dismissal without prejudice — a crucial distinction that would give the Republican-led government political leverage to revive the case later. The judge told the Trump DOJ to respond by next week, raising a big question for the lawyer leading the DOJ effort, Emil Bove: Will he give up the leverage he’s been fighting for — prompting several prosecutorial resignations and bar complaints against him in the process — and agree the case should be killed forever?
That’s hard to picture, but we’ll find out next week, which also features Supreme Court arguments in Mexico’s novel lawsuit against U.S. gunmakers. Our southern neighbor seeks to hold them liable for fueling violence there by supplying Mexican drug cartels’ demand for military-style weapons. Who says we don’t make anything anymore?
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