Supreme Court halts block of previous order blocking Trump aid freeze

The issue of the power of the president having the authority to freeze aid that was congressionally approved is back in play.

Trump challenged this during his first administration, and he is back at it again.

The Ukraine Freeze

If you go back to the early days of Trump’s first term, he froze aid slated to go to Ukraine, saying at the time that he wanted to make sure the blatant corruption in the country had been addressed.

Democrats pushed back on this, and the matter was litigated, but it also became part of Trump’s impeachment, with Democrats saying that Trump did this for a quid pro quo with Ukraine.

They claimed Trump wanted Ukraine to back his narrative that Joe and Hunter Biden were involved in corruption by having an investigation into the matter.

When Trump was asked if he asked Ukraine to dig up dirt on Biden, he responded, “No, I didn’t — I didn’t do it. Why would you give money to a country that you think is corrupt?”

Trump Pauses Foreign Aid

The conclusion from the first go-around was that the president does not have the authority to hold back congressionally approved aid. This conclusion was reached even though Joe Biden openly admitted, as vice president, that he threatened to withhold aid from Ukraine if the country did not fire its prosecutor.

This time around, Trump signed executive orders on his first day in office, some of which targeted foreign aid.

That order was called, “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid,” which paused the aid for 90 days while his administration evaluated everything.

Democrats were outraged and once again, legal challenges were immediately filed to block Trump’s order.

Supreme Court Steps In

Trump’s order had been blocked in the lower courts, but he did get some temporary relief from Chief Justice John Roberts.

Roberts paused the previous order, giving the plaintiffs until Friday to respond, at which point he would decide how to proceed in the case.

As I noted before, this issue has been litigated before, so I was actually surprised when Roberts even considered the pause, so that is some good news for Trump in that he is actually considering it.

I would love to see this fully litigated at the Supreme Court level, as I just don’t see why a sitting president cannot verify that there is no corruption or fraud. Trump did not cancel the funding, he merely paused it, and that should be perfectly legal. Someone has to stop this corruption!