"The president will now have the power to legislate and the power to appropriate?"

 

Does anyone else remember the kerfuffle over the Trump International Hotel in Washington from early in the first Trump administration? The hotel was located in the Old Post Office building, a federal property that the Trump Organization had leased in 2013 and continued to lease after Donald Trump became president. The idea that the president would benefit privately from an arrangement with an agency over which he had authority was scandalous, and we all got a nice little civics lesson on the emoluments clause of the Constitution.

That all feels a bit quaint in hindsight. On Monday, Trump settled a $10 billion lawsuit he had filed against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns in 2019. Under the settlement, the Department of Justice established a $1.776 billion fund “to issue formal apologies and monetary relief” to those “who suffered weaponization and lawfare.” While the terms of the settlement dictate that neither Trump nor any of his family members can benefit, he has broad control over who does. If that sounds a little funny to you, or you’re wondering who might be on the receiving end of our tax dollars, let Kevin D. Williamson explain:

Donald Trump has sued the Donald Trump administration over alleged wrongdoing by the Donald Trump administration, and an out-of-court settlement between Donald Trump and the Donald Trump administration will have Donald Trump’s DOJ ponying up the better part of $2 billion to be put into a fund controlled by Donald Trump and used for the benefit of—let’s check in here with dead-eyed White House trash panda J.D. Vance—“people who voted for Donald Trump and participated in the January 6th protests.”

On Tuesday, a day after the fund was announced, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche—Trump’s former personal lawyer—issued an addendum to the settlement banning the IRS from ever auditing the past tax returns of Trump, his family, or their businesses. In Boiling Frogs, Nick Catoggio had some thoughts on that:

One might assume that a taxpayer-funded payday for criminals wouldn’t look worse as details emerged, the concept already being as rotten as rotten gets. One would be wrong. For instance, did you know that the part of the settlement that bars the IRS from proceeding with any pending audits of the president’s tax returns might be worth more than $100 million to him? Trump, a billionaire, paid a total of $750 in income tax in 2016 and $750 again in 2017. The taxman will henceforth take no notice of that fact. Did you also know that, under federal law, the only official empowered to ask the IRS to terminate an audit is the attorney general? That was a problem for Trump in this case, per Andy McCarthy: Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche used to be the president’s personal defense lawyer, and lawyers are supposed to recuse themselves in cases pitting their current client against a former one. Blanche had an obvious conflict of interest. He ignored it and nuked Trump’s tax audits anyway.

Is there any way that any of this is legal? For that we turn to Sarah Isgur and David French at Advisory Opinions. On Thursday’s episode, they run through the ways that the settlement could possibly pass legal muster. Sarah starts by asking what, exactly, the agreement is. Is it a settlement to Trump, who sued as a private citizen? Is it a class action lawsuit? Or is it money for “future claimants”? Those could all potentially be legal under certain circumstances, they agree. But they also agree that none of those circumstances reflect what is going on with this weaponization fund. And Sarah shares an even bigger concern about the long-term consequences:

This to me feels like, if we've already ended the legislative power of Congress and handed that over to the president in the form of, you know, government by executive action and how bad that has been for the country in the last 15 years, this is the end of the power of the purse. The president will now have the power to legislate and the power to appropriate? We're done.

-Rachael Larimore, Dispatch Weekly