The New York Times ran the latest lawfare story yesterday under the deceptive headline, “
Judge Orders U.S.A.I.D. and State Dept. to Pay Funds ‘Unlawfully’ Withheld.” But that was exactly what the new order
didn’t do. Last week, we left the Muslim-dual-Canadian-citizen federal judge case in a swirl of hot takes, after the Supreme Court dramatically denied Trump’s emergency motion to stay Judge Ali’s TRO. And I told you not to panic.
As regular readers will recall, the Supremes tossed the case back to Judge Ali with a stinker of a dissenting opinion and directed the young judge to issue a new, “clarified” TRO that considered what was feasible. As predicted, Ali was forced to hold a hearing on “feasibility,” and yesterday, on the TRO’s deadline, he stopped messing about with TROs and just went ahead and
issued a 48-page preliminary injunction and got it over with.
How times change! Evidencing the powerful Dissent’s impact, the lengthy decision expounded at length on all the
limits to Judge Ali’s powers. The abashed judge conceded plainly, “the Court is mindful of limitations on its own authority.” The bottom line was: a chastened but chatty Judge Ali talked a lot, and ultimately scampered backwards from his previous breathtaking TRO requiring all current USAID contracts to be immediately paid.
Judge Ali denied nearly all the Plaintiff NGOs’ requested relief. “Plaintiffs’ proposed relief highlights further difficulty with their argument,” the judge wrote. If he did what they asked, it “would devolve into the type of intensive supervision of day-to-day agency activities, as well as inquiry into the terms of individual awards, that the Court has expressly rejected.”
Thus, “the Court finds that dictating operational decisions would go beyond the proper relief,” and “the Court cannot adopt Plaintiffs’ proposal that Defendants achieve payment processing rates equivalent to those achieved before January 20, 2025.”
Indeed, and contrary to the Times’ lying headline, this time Ali did not order the government to pay anything. Instead, his new order shriveled to two narrowed, watered-down, passive-voiced commands: that the Trump Administration “shall not withhold payments or letter of credit drawdowns for work completed prior to February 13, 2025” and that it “shall make available for obligation the full amount of funds that Congress appropriated for foreign assistance programs.” Instead of a deadline, Judge Ali asked for a status report by March 14th that “proposes a schedule for next steps in this matter.”
Now the Trump Administration has a solid, appealable preliminary injunction instead of a squishy temporary TRO. Using a common judicial technique, Judge Ali tried to discourage any appeal by weakening his own ruling. Baby-splitting.
Not surprisingly, the State Department has only said it was
considering appealing the downsized order, meaning that Trump’s lawyers are musing over how they might yet navigate compliance with the weaker order without clambering back up the appellate ladder. We’ll see. In my quick read, the order seems susceptible to appeal, mostly because it failed to address the main complaint by the four dissenting Supreme Court justices, which was the muscular assertion of the government’s “sovereign immunity.”
That term, “sovereign immunity,” appeared only once in Judge Ali’s 48-page opus. In light of the brawny Dissent, he should have meticulously analyzed that particular issue. That he avoided dealing with it at all suggests he knows it was a trap. And in further evidence of its gravitational force, the Times’ article ended by quoting that particular section from the Dissent— proving I’m not the only one who noticed.
Judge Ali’s orders have shrunk faster than processed food package sizes. In other words, our patience was justified. The Supreme Court’s denial of Trump’s stay request last week was effective procedural sleight of hand, simultaneously preserving the Court’s independence while also undermining Judge Ali. In other words, they cleverly boxed Ali in without making him a media martyr. This current order was a rout; it wasn’t even
close to what he was trying to get away with in his TRO.
It’s Trump’s move.
Judge Ali case advances with striking injunction; DC court backs Trump firing special counsel; GA grifter defends $2B Biden climate grant; Long Covid nonsense; Zelensky flops in Riyadh; more.
www.coffeeandcovid.com
Britain is, allegedly, a first world country. Why is our “humanitarian agency” funding the British?
thepostmillennial.com