WASHINGTON _ House Democrats' lawsuit over the Trump administration's reallocation of government funds to help pay for a U.S.-Mexico border wall has been revived by a federal appeals court in Washington.
The suit accused President Donald Trump of violating the Constitution by proceeding with his wall without congressional approval and by using funds that Congress had appropriated for other purposes. A three-judge panel of the appeals court on Friday scrapped a lower-court decision that said the House didn't have legal standing to challenge the transfer of funds.
"The Executive Branch has, in a word, snatched the House's key out of its hands," Judge David Sentelle wrote in a 24-page ruling. "The ironclad constitutional rule is that the Executive Branch cannot spend until both the House and the Senate say so."
The Department of Treasury did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The legal battle stems from a dispute over wall funding that led to a government shutdown in early 2019. After Congress refused to appropriate the funds the White House had requested to construct the wall, Trump declared a national emergency and allocated a total of $8.1 billion to the project, much of which was designated for other purposes, like combating organized crime.
The House alleged that the Trump administration violated the Appropriations Clause of the Constitution by doing an end-run around Congress to fund the wall, one of the president's signature campaign promises.
The court's decision in favor of the House is unlikely to interfere with border-wall construction anytime soon. Over the summer, another appeals court ruled against the government's allocation of funds to pay for the wall. But in a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court turned down a request from opponents of Trump to halt construction while the litigation continued.
The dispute is part of a series of legal contests between Trump and Congress over the scope of executive authority. The House also sued to force former White House counsel Don McGahn to testify before Congress, challenging the White House's claim that it has total immunity from such subpoenas.
That court battle seemed resolved in August when the full slate of appeals judges in Washington ruled that Congress has legal standing to sue the executive branch. But the case was sent back to a smaller panel, which found a different basis to reject the suit. The House has vowed to seek another reversal from the full appeals court.
Lawyers for Donald Trump were met with skepticism from federal appeals court judges as they made their latest attempt to block New York prosecutors from getting their hands on his tax filings and other financial documents through a grand jury subpoena.
"Are you asking us to change the way grand juries have done their work from time immemorial just because we're dealing with somebody who's president of the United States?" U.S. Circuit Judge Robert Katzmann asked Trump lawyer William Consovoy at a hearing on Friday. The case is being heard by a three-judge panel of the court.
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. is seeking eight years of the president's taxes and other financial records as part of a grand jury investigation looking into matters including payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election.
The appeal is before the Manhattan-based court for a second time, after the U.S. Supreme Court in July rejected Trump's argument that, as president, he has sweeping immunity from state criminal investigations. A lawyer for Trump in the earlier appeal argued that the president wouldn't be subject to prosecution while in office if he were to make good on his famous boast that he could shoot someone on New York's Fifth Avenue without losing supporters.
In its ruling, the Supreme Court said Trump could assert more narrow defenses to the subpoena of his accountants at Mazars USA. U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero subsequently rejected Trump's arguments that the subpoena was overly broad and issued in bad faith to harass him, leading to a fresh appeal.
"If you were to look up the definition of 'fishing expedition,' this is it," Consovoy said of the subpoena Friday, urging the judges to overturn Marrero's ruling.
But U.S. Circuit Judge Pierre Leval called "highly contrived" Consovoy's contention that Vance's use of a subpoena modeled on one issued by a Congressional committee showed the prosecutor was simply trying to harass Trump. Carey Dunne, a lawyer for Vance's office, told the judges that the prosecutors used the Congressional subpoena to Mazars as a model to make it easier and more efficient for the firm to comply.
The judges also questioned Consovoy's argument that the grand jury investigation was limited to the 2016 hush-money payments and didn't include other possible crimes, including potential tax fraud and insurance fraud. "Grand juries, as you know, are given broad authority to do their work," Katzmann told the lawyer.
Consovoy said the president was not seeking special treatment, only "the basic protections that all other citizens receive."
Vance has avoided describing the scope of the investigation publicly, citing grand jury secrecy laws. But Dunne said his office has made it clear the probe isn't limited to the 2016 payments.
The appeal was heard on an accelerated schedule, meaning a decision may come before the election on Nov. 3. Grand jury secrecy laws make it unlikely that Trump's tax returns would be made public by Vance before then. And the president is likely to seek review by the Supreme Court if he loses.
