NY Times legal expert slams Trump’s ‘lap dog’ Supreme Court over border wall funding decision in blistering column

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision handed down on July 26, ruled in favor of President Donald Trump when it decided that he could shift federal funds in order to pay for a U.S./Mexico border wall. And one of the most vehement critics of the decision is veteran New York Times legal analyst Linda Greenhouse, who slammed the ruling in a blistering column published on Thursday and asserted that the High Court has become the Trump Administration’s “lap dog.”

“The Supreme Court permitted the Trump Administration to violate a federal statute and quite likely, the Constitution itself,” Greenhouse asserts.

With its July 26 decision, Greenhouse notes, the Supreme Court provided a stay of an injunction in which a federal district judge blocked “the Defense Department from moving $2.5 billion dollars from one account, where the Department’s 2019 appropriations act had placed the money, into a different account that fell far short of the president’s budget request. The president had wanted $5.7 billion, to be used to build or fortify a border wall in ten locations.”

The Supreme Court’s ruling and Trump’s shifting of federal funds without congressional approval, Greenhouses stresses, is problematic because it “violates the constitutional separation of powers.”

Greenhouse explains, “The Court did this in response to a request the Administration styled as an emergency. The Court acted without a public hearing, without a signed opinion and over the dissenting votes of the four liberal justices. As a result, although the case is still on appeal to a federal appeals court, the (Trump) Administration can now sign contracts for 100 miles of a 30-foot-high steel wall in five locations where Congress prohibited construction, using money that Congress refused to allocate for that purpose.”

Greenhouse ends her column on a somber note, emphasizing that the United States’ highest judicial body is now firmly in Trump’s pocket. With this decision, she laments, the Court’s “majority rushed to give the Administration everything it asked for” — which, she writes, “tells us all we need to know about the Supreme Court at this moment and sadly, frighteningly, tells President Trump the same thing.”