\n<\/p>\n
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has been one of the most vociferous defenders of President Donald Trump\u2019s expansive use of executive authority, withholding billions of dollars in federal funding to states and dismissing protests of the White House\u2019s boundary-pushing behavior as the gripings of \u201cdisenfranchised Democrats.\u201d<\/p>\n
But court documents reviewed by ProPublica show that a decade ago, as a House member, Duffy took a drastically different position on presidential power, articulating a full-throated defense of Congress\u2019 role as a check on the president \u2014 one that resembled the very arguments made by speakers at recent anti-Trump \u201cNo Kings\u201d rallies around the country.<\/p>\n
In an assertive, thoroughly researched 2015 legal brief, Duffy, then a Republican representative from Wisconsin, detailed the history of America\u2019s creation in reaction to the absolute power of the English crown, invoking the Magna Carta and the Founding Fathers as he made the case for the separation of powers.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust as Congress may not bestow upon the President Congress\u2019s own exclusive power to make, or to repeal, federal law,\u201d Duffy argued, citing a 1998 court decision, \u201cit may not bestow upon the Executive its own exclusive power of the purse.\u201d<\/p>\n
The brief went on to cite James Madison\u2019s account of the Constitutional Convention, where there was \u201cunanimous agreement that Congress, not the President, should control the purse.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the time, Duffy filed the friend-of-the-court brief in support of a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of how the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau gets funded. Duffy, who chaired the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, maintained that the agency\u2019s unique funding system \u2014 its dollars come directly from the Federal Reserve System rather than by a congressional appropriation \u2014 improperly bypassed lawmakers\u2019 authority.<\/p>\n
The 39-page brief was filed under Duffy\u2019s name along with a nonprofit group aligned with the Republican legal activist Leonard Leo and submitted by a preeminent conservative lawyer. Today, it stands in stark contrast to Duffy\u2019s own actions as transportation secretary in the first year of Trump\u2019s second stint in the White House. Indeed, his attempts to restrict congressionally appropriated transportation funding across all 50 states this year have been condemned by a congressional watchdog and federal judges, resulting in stinging public rebukes from the other branches of government that echo his own 2015 position.<\/p>\n
Peter Levine, a civics expert at Tufts University, said that while it could be that Duffy\u2019s views on presidential power have evolved over time, his apparent flip-flopping on something as fundamental as the meaning of the Constitution raises the prospect that Duffy may \u201cjust be playing a game for power.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Constitution is a promise to continue to apply the same rules and norms over time to everybody,\u201d he added. \u201cWhen political actors completely ignore that, and just go after their own thing, I don\u2019t think the Constitution can actually function.\u201d<\/p>\n
In response to questions, a Department of Transportation spokesperson asked for a copy of Duffy\u2019s brief. But after ProPublica provided it, the spokesperson stopped responding. A message sent to a number listed for Duffy hasn\u2019t been returned.<\/p>\n
The expansion of executive power has been a hallmark of Trump\u2019s second administration. The president issued a whopping 214 executive orders between Jan. 20 and Nov. 20, according to the The American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In both \u201cnumber and ambition,\u201d the orders and resulting actions are \u201cexceeded on these dimensions in the last century only by Franklin D. Roosevelt,\u201d one Harvard Law School professor recently noted.<\/p>\n
Duffy has cited some of those directives as he has withheld congressionally approved transportation funds. And administration officials have defended doing so, claiming that a post-Watergate law asserting Congress\u2019 power over spending improperly restrains the president\u2019s authority.<\/p>\n
But a congressional watchdog and the courts have taken issue with that expansive interpretation of federal authority.<\/p>\n
For Duffy, the first instance came in May, when the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, concluded that the DOT had violated the law when it halted payments in February from a $5 billion fund for electric car charging stations that Congress approved under former President Joe Biden\u2019s bipartisan infrastructure law.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Constitution specifically vests Congress with the power of the purse,\u201d the congressional watchdog wrote, arguing that the payments should resume. \u201cThe Constitution grants the President no unilateral authority to withhold funds from obligation.\u201d<\/p>\n
A White House spokesperson called the GAO\u2019s opinion \u201cincorrect\u201d when it was issued and argued that the DOT was \u201cappropriately using\u201d its authority.<\/p>\n
In June, a federal judge in Washington ordered transportation officials to lift the pause after a handful of states sued Duffy and the DOT, writing that when the executive branch \u201ctreads upon the will of the Legislative Branch,\u201d it\u2019s up to the court \u201cto remediate the situation and restore the balance of power.\u201d<\/p>\n
The government has moved to dismiss the lawsuit, writing that it had revamped the grant application process for the charging station money and also that the states\u2019 constitutional concerns were unfounded, since another part of the Constitution \u201cvests the President with broad, discretionary authority to \u2018take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.\u2019\u201d The suit is ongoing.<\/p>\n
Separately, a federal judge last month sided with states that had challenged an attempt by Duffy to condition billions of dollars more in federal funds for highway maintenance and other core transportation functions in exchange for helping the administration detain immigrants.<\/p>\n
\u201cShould Congress have wished, it could have attempted to entice State cooperation with federal civil immigration enforcement through lawful means, and it could have sought to empower federal agencies to assist it in doing so,\u201d John McConnell Jr., the chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island, wrote in a Nov. 4 decision blocking Duffy\u2019s actions.<\/p>\n
But it didn\u2019t, he said, and instead administration officials had \u201ctransgressed well-settled constitutional limitations on federal funding conditions.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Constitution demands the Court set aside this lawless behavior,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n
The lawsuits are among hundreds of legal actions this year challenging the constitutionality of the White House\u2019s various actions, including its attempts to halt the disbursement of hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending that Congress had previously approved.<\/p>\n
As for the legal challenge Duffy supported in 2015, it was ultimately unsuccessful and the Supreme Court last year affirmed the constitutionality of the CFPB\u2019s funding mechanism.<\/p>\n
Yet the ruling has not insulated the bureau from the Trump administration, and officials have advanced novel legal theories to achieve what Duffy sought a decade ago. The administration now argues that since the Fed operates at a loss, it has no profits to transfer to the CFPB.<\/p>\n
As a result, the bureau is being starved. According to a recent court filing by government lawyers, it will run out of operating funds by early next year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has been one of the most vociferous defenders of President Donald Trump\u2019s expansive use of executive authority, withholding billions of dollars in federal funding to states and dismissing protests of the White House\u2019s boundary-pushing behavior as the gripings of \u201cdisenfranchised Democrats.\u201d But court documents reviewed by ProPublica show that a decade<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":36111,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[4579,5735,5521,3506,1664,247,8719,1841],"class_list":{"0":"post-36110","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-congress","9":"tag-defended","10":"tag-defies","11":"tag-duffy","12":"tag-power","13":"tag-propublica","14":"tag-purse","15":"tag-sean"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36110\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/36111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}