Trump's $1.7B Fund: Legal Analysis

Members can share articles with friends & family to bypass the paywall. Sarah Isgur and David French analyze President Donald Trump’s $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund through the lens of three legal “buckets,” and talk about how federal appropriations work and the Obama-era case that hangs over this legal issue. The two also discuss the Supreme Court’s latest cert grant on a Title IX case, plus the circuit split brewing over the First Amendment and judicial elections. –Court agrees to hear case on the ability of employees to bring certain suits for sex discrimination –Going through the settlement agreement, it’s practically a blank check! –Todd Blanche essentially pardons Trump’s family –‘That’s not how appropriations work.’ –Georgia Supreme Court race finishes strong –Chief Judge William Pryor’s opinion Advisory Opinions is a production of SCOTUSblog and The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a nonpartisan perspective. Click here to sign up for our new Advisory Opinions newsletter, and click here to access all of The Dispatch’s offerings, including audio versions of all our articles and newsletters. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member by clicking here. Sarah Isgur is a senior editor at The Dispatch and is based in northern Virginia. Prior to joining the company in 2019, she had worked in every branch of the federal government and on three presidential campaigns. She’s also a ABC News contributor and the author of Last Branch Standing, a deep dive into the inner workings of the Supreme Court. When Sarah is not hosting podcasts or writing newsletters, she’s probably sending uplifting stories about spiders to Jonah, who only pretends to love all animals. David French is a columnist for the New York Times. He’s a former senior editor of The Dispatch. He’s the author most recently of Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation. The podcast transcription below was generated using artificial intelligence and may include occasional errors or misspellings. Welcome to Advisory Opinions. I'm Sarah Isgur, that's David French, and on today's episode, we are digging into the nine-page settlement agreement between the Department of Justice and Donald Trump, uh, and the $1.776 billion that has been withdrawn from the general fund. Say what now? We'll dig into all of the ways in which this could be legal, could have been done, is it legal? Everything involved in that. We will also talk about the Supreme Court's latest cert grant in brief, Title IX. Does it apply to employees or just students? And the Georgia Supreme Court race finishes out strong, but don't worry because we have cases from the Sixth Circuit and the 11th Circuit, a kind of circuit split brewing about the First Amendment and judicial elections. We'll weigh in on that too. And David, I just have to tell you, I spoke to the judges of the Southern District of New York yesterday, and I got an SDNY tote bag, and it is my new prized possession. So if you ever see me out in the wild, I'm gonna be carrying an SDNY tote bag so proudly, and if you don't know this, um, the Southern District of New York is sometimes called the Sovereign District of New York because Maine justice folks take a little umbrage at the, uh, SDNY US Attorney's Office for acting too independently in the SDNY US Attorney's Office. Um, I'm sure they have all sorts of derisive names for Maine justice, uh, but I just think that someone out there should make a Sovereign District of New York tote bag, and then I can have dueling SDNY tote bags. But an exciting day for me in New York. More to come on Advisory Opinions. Well, David, we did get a list of orders this week, and there was one new cert grant from the Supreme Court. Reading here from Amy Howe's write-up on SCOTUSblog, the court granted review in Crowther versus Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia. The case began as a pair of lawsuits filed by an art professor and a women's basketball coach at two public universities in Georgia, both alleging that they had been the victim of sex discrimination. The US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit threw out their claims. In an opinion by Chief Judge William Pryor, that court concluded that employees cannot bring lawsuits under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which bars sex discrimination by schools that receive federal funding. Pryor pointed to the text of the statute, which provides that, quote, "No person shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance." Nothing about that language, he wrote, indicates congressional intent to provide a private right of action to employees of educational institutions. So David, they'll hear that case in the fall. We'll obviously cover it when there's oral argument. I am loathe to disagree with Chief Judge Bill Pryor of the 11th Circuit, and I think he, generally speaking, has his pulse on this Supreme Court. He sort of is a Jeff Sutton-esque figure for me. Um, he's one of those elder statesmen of the circuit courts that easily could have been a Supreme Court justice, you know, with different timing and different luck. You know, fun fact, it was actually, you know, at the end of the day, kind of a Pryor versus Gorsuch battle for that opening. Um, Gorsuch obviously won. I've sort of talked about the role that former clerks play in those sort of, uh, showdowns privately behind the scenes, and it can turn into a bit of a clerk brawl. The, the Pryor clerks felt like they brought, you know, a knife to a gunfight type thing, um, when it came to that, that moment in time back then. Nevertheless, like, yeah, I, I don't know. Like, first blush, David, I'm inclined to think Pryor's just right about this one, that if Congress had meant to make sort of educational institutions just this separate thing for their employees but not any other types of employees get that benefit, that would seem weird to me. I'm with you, Sarah. As soon as you said Pryor, I thought, "Ha, Interactive transcripts are available to Premium members. Join to follow along with the audio.