Feb.13

electoral-vote.com

Dem 47

   

GOP 53

Split Decision in the Appeals Courts

Many lawsuits have been filed against Donald Trump's XOs. In half a dozen cases, a judge has already made a temporary ruling, generally to ban the XO from going into effect until the judge has had a chance to hear the case on its merits. Nevertheless, one case made it to the appeals court already and another appeals court weighed in on an earlier case.

• The Freeze: One of the XOs ordered a complete freeze on almost all federal disbursements except those mandated by law. U.S. District Judge John McConnell ruled that disbursements must continue as scheduled until he can hear the case and make a ruling. From the ruling, it was clear that the judge saw this as the executive branch trying to impound funds, which violates the law. The government appealed. A three-judge panel in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in Boston, has now unanimously upheld McConnell's ruling and put the ball back in McConnell's court.
  
  The appeals court's ruling was brutal. It said the government didn't cite any authority for its position or list any harm that it would face if the stay were kept in place until the judge made a ruling on the merits. It's hard for the government to show that it would be harmed by fulfilling all its legal and contractual obligations, after all.
  
  
• Documents Case: The other appeals court decision is quite different. It is not about an XO. It is about the case against Donald Trump for stealing government documents and storing them in his bathroom at Mar-a-Lago in 2021. In this case, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon threw out the case against Trump on the grounds that the special prosecutor law is unconstitutional—despite it being used many times in the past 50 years and no other judge noticing this. Maybe she is more of a stickler for details than all the others. Or maybe she would just love, love, love, for Trump to promote her to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. In any event, the Biden DoJ appealed the case in an attempt to get Cannon's ruling thrown into the paper shredder so the case could continue. Now, the Trump DoJ has withdrawn the appeal and asked the court to throw out the case altogether. Since the prosecution is no longer interested in prosecuting the case, the circuit court has now formally dismissed it. This is what Trump had been hoping for all along, and is probably the main reason he ran for president—to instruct the DoJ to drop the cases against him.

What these two cases show is that sometimes the courts move like a hare (see #1 above) and sometimes like a tortoise (see #2). (V)