This sparked a heated debate over a provision of the Constitution that most lawyers knew little about and that laymen could not pronounce: the Emoluments Clause.
The court’s action raises the question of how judges will deal with a myriad of other lawsuits and disputes relating to the now ex-president, and whether Trump’s side can prevail simply because he ran the time and the courts allowed him to do so. .
A fee case was originally filed by lawyers in Washington, DC and Maryland, who argued that Trump violated the constitution by accepting payments from foreign and domestic governments through the Trump International Hotel. Another was brought in by several members of the hospitality industry who own or work in hotels and restaurants who argued that they were also at a competitive disadvantage because Trump did not use a blind trust when he assumed the presidency, but instead continued to maintain interest in his business. .
In rejecting the lawsuits on Monday, no judge noticed a dissent suggesting that they all believed there was no case or controversy remaining because Trump is no longer in office.
Although the case in question died and the appellate court’s views against the president were void, DC Attorney General Karl Racine, who was behind one of the disputes, said that all was not lost for his side.
“Our process has demonstrated for the first time that the Emoluments Clauses, century-old anti-corruption protections embedded in the Constitution, can be applied and that these clauses mean that federal authorities cannot accept anything of value from foreign or domestic governments,” said Racine.
“The Supreme Court decision,” he added, which erased the opinion of an appeals court, “did not disturb the district court’s decisions that set this critical precedent.”
But even so, the subpoenas that would have advanced to explore some of Trump’s financial negotiations will not be carried forward.
If Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson was correct, it is now an open question awaiting a similar dispute that may never happen.
Trump’s Twitter account
Judges have yet to act on a case about whether Trump violated the First Amendment in 2017, when he blocked followers from his Twitter account. Just before leaving office, the Trump Justice Department argued that the dispute should be considered debatable and an opinion from a lower court that was against Trump should be erased under the same legal doctrine that the court cited when vacating the fee cases. .
But John Elwood of Arnold & Porter, who frequently argues before the Supreme Court, suggested in his own Twitter feed that even without Trump in office (or even on Twitter right now), the court may choose not to vacate the opinion of a lower court that went against Trump because President Joe Biden also has a personal account. Elwood suggested that there may still be a case or controversy at stake, as it affects other government officials and that judges may leave the lower court’s opinion against Trump in the books.
“Given the unresolved issues, [there] there may be some reluctance to leave [the] The Executive Branch eliminates adverse precedents, “tweeted Elwood.
Future presidents, of course, are likely to have Twitter and other social media accounts.
Katie Fallow, a lawyer at the Knight First Amendment Institute who sued Trump, also said the case was debatable. But she made this point based on the fact that Trump’s “repeated violations” of Twitter’s terms of service prompted the company to close its account. She told the judges in a lawsuit that they should not overturn the appeals court’s decision.
“Here, the public interest in preventing inadmissible discrimination in government operated social media accounts weighs heavily in favor of keeping the Second Circuit judgment in place,” Fallow wrote in court documents.
Nor did the court act on Monday in cases relating to Trump’s policies that deal with immigration and abortion references, among other issues. These fall into a different category, because the Biden government can rescind the rules and regulations at hand.
But a high-profile case in which the judges have been sitting since October addresses a critical issue for Trump. His personal lawyers asked the judges to suspend an opinion from the court of first instance that allowed a subpoena for his tax records to be forwarded in an investigation conducted by a New York prosecutor. The judges have said nothing so far, and now Trump is no longer in the White House. The court could have acted while Trump was president, but he chose not to.
Did Trump successfully run out of time? He may have passed a clock, but the judges are well aware of something else. The Manhattan prosecutor may end up prevailing in his goal of obtaining the documents, now that Trump is simply an ordinary citizen.