Bipartisan Funding Deals Are Hard to Do. The Supreme Court Might Have Made Them Impossible. (pocket rescissions)

“What’s the point of passing a bill if they just do whatever the hell they want to do anyway?” one Senate Democrat said.

https://www.notus.org/courts/scotus-government-funding-appropriations

https://archive.ph/8KLwz



Democrats and Republicans agree that getting out of this government shutdown won’t be easy. But it will look like a cake walk compared to what comes next. A Supreme Court ruling last week effectively green-lit President Donald Trump’s ability to use “pocket rescissions,” wherein congressionally approved funding is clawed back. That ruling complicates not only shutdown negotiations but any hope for a bipartisan funding agreement in the future. “We need to get assurances that once we make a decision — Democrats and Republicans, we appropriate funds — they’re not going to rescind,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.

Last Friday, the court allowed the Trump administration to withhold $4 billion in foreign aid that had been appropriated by Congress. The justices sent the case back to the lower courts and did not address the legality of the controversial tactic, where the president submits a rescission request so late in the fiscal year that Congress doesn’t have enough time to act on the request, essentially circumventing lawmakers’ power of the purse. In the days since the ruling, as a shutdown looked ever more imminent, Democrats have said their demands to add additional guardrails to a short-term funding bill are much more urgent. DeLauro told NOTUS the Supreme Court’s decision was “disastrous to the appropriations process.”

One Senate Democrat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told NOTUS that in private conversations with colleagues, “there’s still a lot of belief that the appropriators should do the work that they are supposed to do, and there’s faith in that process.” But understanding the ramifications of the Supreme Court’s initial ruling, the senator said, the need for guardrails is exacerbated. “Republicans are asking us, basically, to give Donald Trump a blank check because they refuse to stand up for the bills that we’re passing. What’s the point?” they said. “What’s the point of passing a bill if they just do whatever the hell they want to do anyway?”

Office of Management and Budget’s director, Russell Vought — the mastermind behind the Trump administration’s strategy on pocket rescissions — called the ruling a “major victory” on X. Now that the government is shut down, Vought announced he plans to freeze $18 billion in federal funding for infrastructure projects in New York, citing “unconstitutional DEI principles,” and later posted on X that $8 billion worth of Green New Deal projects were being cancelled in 16 largely Democratic states. These cuts aren’t technically pocket rescissions but they feed into Democrats’ fears that the Trump administration will simply get rid of programs they don’t like, even if Congress funds them through the appropriations process.

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