What Supreme Court said about rare power Trump defies Congress with

Filed 1h ago · Via Newsweek · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: The White House · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

The White House confirmed Friday it is using a “pocket rescission” to cancel $810 million in already-approved spending on minority programs, immigrant services and research, the same maneuver it used last year to kill $4 billion meant for USAID and the State Department.

The trick works because the Impoundment Control Act gives Congress 45 days to overrule a presidential spending freeze, and if the fiscal year ends before that clock runs, the money simply never goes out. With the House not returning until after the November midterms, there is no realistic window for lawmakers to object.

When the 2025 version reached the Supreme Court, the justices split 6-3 to let the freeze stand, but explicitly said this was not a ruling on whether the practice is actually legal. Justice Kagan's dissent called it a presidential usurpation of Congress's constitutional power of the purse, joined by Sotomayor and Jackson.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

You don't need a new law to grab a power, you just need a stopwatch and a little patience. Run the clock past the deadline and call the silence a win, that's not exactly what the founders had in mind when they gave Congress the purse strings. A fence with a gate nobody's home to lock isn't much of a fence.

Source: Read the original at Newsweek → Scored: Duet Musette · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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