- Joined
- Apr 18, 2013
- Messages
- 94,328
- Reaction score
- 82,713
- Location
- Barsoom
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Independent
Federal judge blocks Trump’s executive order on denying funding to sanctuary cities
Once again, Trumps obnoxious tweets boomerang to kick his sanctuary-city-policy in the backside.
Related: Judge rules Trump's sanctuary city order unconstitutional
By Eli Rosenberg
WaPo
November 21, 2017
A federal judge issued an injunction to permanently block President Trump’s executive order to deny funding to cities that refused to cooperate with federal immigration officials, after finding the order unconstitutional. The ruling by District Judge William H. Orrick in San Francisco comes in response to a lawsuit filed by the city of San Francisco and nearby Santa Clara County and follows a temporary halt on the order that the judge issued in April. Orrick, in his summary of the case Monday, found that the Trump administration’s efforts to move local officials to cooperate with its efforts to deport undocumented immigrants violated the separation of powers doctrine as well as the Fifth and Tenth amendments. “The Constitution vests the spending powers in Congress, not the President, so the Executive Order cannot constitutionally place new conditions on federal funds. Further, the Tenth Amendment requires that conditions on federal funds be unambiguous and timely made; that they bear some relation to the funds at issue; and that they not be unduly coercive,” the judge wrote. “Federal funding that bears no meaningful relationship to immigration enforcement cannot be threatened merely because a jurisdiction chooses an immigration enforcement strategy of which the President disapproves.” San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera described Orrick’s decision as a victory for the “rule of law.” “No one is above the law, including the president.
President Trump might be able to tweet whatever comes to mind, but he can’t grant himself new authority because he feels like it,” he said in a statement. “This case is a check on the president’s abuse of power, which is exactly what the framers of the Constitution had in mind.” As other judges did when assessing the travel ban, Orrick took into account the statements of the president, as well as those of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and others in the administration, to assess its intent and purpose. “And if there was doubt about the scope of the Executive Order, the President and Attorney General erased it with their public comments,” Orrick wrote. “The President has called it ‘a weapon’ to use against jurisdictions that disagree with his preferred policies of immigration enforcement, and his press secretary reiterated that the President intends to ensure that ‘counties and other institutions that remain sanctuary cities don’t get federal government funding in compliance with the executive order.’ ” Heidi Li Feldman, a professor of law at Georgetown University, called the judge’s ruling a “recognition of the lawlessness” of the order. “What is amazing about this is the thoroughness with which he dismisses the executive order,” she said. “The major ways in which an executive action can fail to be constitutional are all included in this suit, and Orrick is accepting the argument that literally every way the executive branch could violate the Constitution with regard to municipalities, this administration has.”
Once again, Trumps obnoxious tweets boomerang to kick his sanctuary-city-policy in the backside.
Related: Judge rules Trump's sanctuary city order unconstitutional
