“Checks and balances” is plural for a reason

Congress and courts, together, prompted a different response from the Trump administration.

It’s not unusual that a judge blocked the creation of President Trump’s “settlement” with himself, creating a $1.776 billion fund to reward people Trump deems to have been targeted by the government.

What’s unusual is that the administration calmly said it would comply. From my colleague Ryan Lucas:

The Justice Department on Monday said it will abide by a federal court ruling that puts the Trump administration’s controversial $1.776 billion anti-weaponization fund on hold while a legal challenge plays out in court.

The Trump administration had said the fund would be available to those who alleged the federal government had been weaponized against them, a refrain popularized by some Trump supporters particularly during the Biden administration. Democratic lawmakers had called it a “slush fund” for Trump supporters, and even some Republican lawmakers were reluctant to support it.

The administration statement resembled those of past administrations: In short, we strongly disagree with this ruling but we will follow it.

The statement did not resemble the words and deeds of this administration over the past year: openly insulting judges, ignoring judges, maneuvering around judges, accusing even Republican appointees of political bias, and going to the furthest extreme to appeal to the Supreme Court while expressing open confidence that its conservative supermajority would back the president.

Throughout the past year the president said he would comply with court rulings, but arguably didn’t in some cases, pushed the very idea of compliance in others, and always politicized rulings he didn’t like.

The $1.776 billion fund itself began with an end run around the court overseeing Trump’s lawsuit against himself. Trump dropped his suit and made his settlement without consulting the judge, who is now investigating the case.

Now, suddenly, the administration says it will comply. What changed?

This time, the administration faced skepticism from the courts and Congress.

NPR’s Eric McDaniel reported that lawmakers found the fund so repulsive that as many as 30 Republicans were ready to vote to block it, attaching the bill to immigration funding Trump badly wants.

And this time—at least for now—the administration has backed down.

The Constitution establishes three branches of government, not one or two; and the framers of that document assumed that each branch would jealously guard its power and interests. We now know it takes two branches to restrain the third. The courts do not do it very well on their own.

When Trump was raising and lowering taxes on an almost daily basis, it took a long time for the courts to catch up. Lower courts swiftly ruled that the president usurped the taxing power of Congress, claiming authority under a law that never even mentioned tariffs. But the Supreme Court deferred to the president for almost a year while it considered a final judgment. During all that time he raised, lowered, and collected billions of dollars in taxes, changing federal policy anytime he had an opinion or didn’t like some court case in Brazil.

My friend Sarah Isgur, a veteran Court watcher, has reminded me that the Court often defers to the executive. It deferred to President Biden’s student loan forgiveness for months before making a final judgment against it. But in any case, nobody stopped the president for many months.

Trump was able to seize the power of Congress, even while lower courts ruled against him, because only one branch questioned him. Republicans in Congress obeyed. Trump openly treated Congress with contempt and lawmakers did nothing. Steve Bannon, Trump’s longtime adviser, compared them to the Duma, the Russian parliament that does whatever Vladimir Putin wants.

Lawmakers actively neutered themselves, finding a mechanism to short-circuit a law that called on them to vote Trump’s tariffs up or down.

In the case of the $1.776 billion fund, Democrats said Trump again seized the power of Congress, this time the power of the purse. Trump could argue that a Congressional statute authorized funds to settle lawsuits, but Democrats said this grossly exceeded the scale and isn’t really a “settlement.”

If Republicans again obeyed, Trump might again have ignored, bullied or defied the two courts now pushing back on the $1.776 billion. But an election is coming, Trump is unpopular, and many Republicans seemed unwilling to go along. Suddenly the White House discovered the traditional deference to Court rulings.

My colleague Elena Moore noted this morning that the fight isn’t over. Trump has not fully abandoned his fund. Democrat Tom Suozzi told us this morning he still wants a vote against it. That would be an uncomfortable vote for many Republicans, some of whom want the president to spare them by abandoning his idea. If he pushes forward, it may again take two branches to stop him.