A U.S. Court of Appeals has upheld an injunction against an Arkansas program that imposes work-related requirements on Medicaid recipients.
In its February 14 ruling, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar’s approval of the program was “arbitrary and capricious.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled this month that 215 members of Congress lacked the legal standing to sue President Trump for violations of the Foreign Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, reversing a district court decision from September 2018.
The 3-0 decision issued on February 7 was limited to the issue of whether the lawmakers had legal standing to file their original 2017 lawsuit. The ruling in Richard Blumenthal, et al., v. Donald J. Trump, in his official capacity as President of the United States of America held that the 215 members of Congress lacked that standing and remanded the case to the district court “with instructions to dismiss the complaint.”
By Aryana Thompson In late January, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 to allow a Department of Homeland Security rule change denying green cards and other temporary visas to noncitizens deemed a “public charge.” Under the new immigration rule, […]
I wrote an op/ed that was published last week in the Amsterdam News entitled “The Trump Era.” It is an overview of the policies and practices of President Trump and his administration from the time he took the oath of office […]
The U.S. Court of Appeals has vacated a lower court decision that blocked the Emoluments case against President Trump. The September 13 ruling in Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington v. Trump, reversed the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (George B. Daniels, J.), which had granted the president’s motion to dismiss the action based on the Domestic and Foreign Emoluments Clauses of the Constitution. The Second Circuit vacated and remanded this decision in a decision written by circuit judge Pierre N. Leval. Judge John M. Walker, Jr. issued a dissenting opinion, largely drawing on a similar case in the Fourth Circuit.
The plaintiffs, some of whom are hoteliers and restaurant-owners, allege that “they directly compete with the president’s establishments for foreign, state, and federal government clientele” and have lost business after November 2016, according to the Second Circuit’s ruling. The plaintiffs also claim that the president has been “implicitly soliciting the patronage of government officials” and that “he favors governments that patronize his businesses” and that this had the desired effect – governments and diplomats spending money at the Trump establishments. The president’s receipt of the revenues would thus violate the Foreign and Domestic Emoluments Clauses. The plaintiffs seek declaratory and injunctive relief, viz. a declaration from the courts that the president’s conduct violates the constitution and an injunction to stop this behavior and release financial records.
In a strongly worded ruling last week, Federal District Judge Victor Marrero rejected Donald Trump’s attempt to protect his tax returns from a grand jury subpoena. Trump sought a preliminary injunction to block the state subpoena for the returns held by his accounting firm, Mazars.
The October 7, 2019 ruling in Trump v. Vance et al. eviscerated Trump’s lawyers’ arguments, which amounted to a claim that “the person who serves as President, while in office, enjoys absolute immunity from criminal process of any kind” including “investigations, grand jury proceedings and subpoenas, indictment, prosecution, arrest, trial, conviction, and incarceration…” and that this doctrine would extend to any affiliate of the president who may have collaborated with him.
On September 11, 2019, in a 7 to 2 vote, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively permitted the Trump administration to enforce a ban on Central American asylum-seekers, while an appeal continues in a lower court.
The ruling in William Barr, Attorney General, et al. v. East Bay Sanctuary Covenant et al, was temporary in nature, as the Court order stated “If a writ of certiorari is sought and the Court denies the petition, this order shall terminate automatically. If the Court grants the petition for a writ of certiorari, this order shall terminate when the Court enters its judgment.”
On July 10, 2019, the judges of the fourth circuit Court of
Appeals ruled against the District of Columbia and the State of Maryland in
their lawsuit against Donald Trump for violating the Foreign and Domestic
Emoluments Clauses of the U.S. Constitution.
Judges Paul Niemeyer, A. Marvin Quattlebaum, and Dennis Shedd
concluded “the District and Maryland’s interest in enforcing the Emoluments
Clauses is so attenuated and abstract that their prosecution of this case
readily provokes the question of whether this action against the President is
an appropriate use of the courts, which were created to resolve real cases and
controversies between the parties” (Opinion, 35-36). The court granted
President Trump’s writ of mandamus, and reversed the District Court’s ruling.
On July 2, 2019, Federal District Judge Marsha Pechman of the Western District of Washington at Seattle affirmed a preliminary injunction granted in April and modified the injunction “to find that the statutory prohibition at Immigration and Nationality Act § 235(b)(1)(B)(ii) against releasing on bond persons found to have a credible fear of persecution if returned to their country and awaiting a determination of their asylum application violates the U.S. Constitution; the Bond Hearing Class is constitutionally entitled to a bond hearing (under the conditions enumerated above) pending resolution of their asylum applications.”
On July 11th, President Trump announced an executive order calling every federal agency to hand over any information regarding the number of citizens in the U.S. to the Department of Commerce, a move that appeared to end the White House’s effort to include a citizenship question in the U.S. 2020 census.
Trump said, “We will utilize these vast federal databases to gain a full, complete, and accurate count of the noncitizen population including databases maintained by the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration. We have great knowledge in many of our agencies. We will leave no stone unturned.”