Roberts Memo Could Complicate Trump's Spending Freeze

[Passages]

As a constitutional crisis seems headed to the Supreme Court, documents show the chief justice declared that a president has no authority to block required spending.

National Politics
Jan 28, 2025

In a 1985 memo to the White House’s top lawyer, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that a president may not block congressionally required spending — a declaration on a major legal question that now seems destined to move from the Trump White House to Roberts’ Supreme Court.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump’s administration issued an order declaring that “all agencies must temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all federal financial assistance.” The directive — which sowed chaos throughout the country’s Medicaid and Head Start programs — was temporarily stayed by a federal judge. But the dispute over spending authority has created a constitutional crisis that is likely to be appealed up to the high court.

Roberts already outlined his views on such powers during his tenure in President Ronald Reagan’s White House Counsel’s Office.

snip
In that memo, Roberts declared that “the question of whether the president has such authority (to block congressionally mandated spending) is not free from doubt, but I think it clear that he has none in normal situations.”
https://www.levernews.com/roberts-memo-could-complicate-trumps-spending-freeze/

[Walleye]

1. He will cave to Trump, and he has his rationalization excuses already

[Passages]

2. I am holding onto straws of hope he will not cave to his king.

[Walleye]

3. Me too, but so far he hasn't shown any more backbone than the rest of

[Passages]

4. Agree. I am desperate to see some degree of safe guards put in place.

[FBaggins]

5. The case will be moot long before it gets to SCOTUS

I’m sure the same question (re: whether he can block some authorized spending) will still need answering, but the “temporary pause” should end long before that

[Passages]

6. I hope so.

Trump is a marketer, so to some extent, he seems to be leveraging shock and awe for his fans. But that may be my wishful thinking b/c if the SCOTUS doesn't stop him we are in deep trouble.

[Lonestarblue]

7. That was 1985. The SC has now moved far to the right.

And it was Roberts who pushed to give trump almost total immunity.

[Passages]

8. Yes. I believe we are all skeptical.

I am hoping for a miracle.

[Igel]

9. That's how I understood the law.

But this morning during my 25 minute drive to work, listening to NPR, I realized what I understood them to be saying the law meant and what I understood the law that they'd been citing to mean were divergent, sharply so.

They were basically saying that spending Congress authorized couldn't be blocked, and used that precise word. But "authorized" and "required" are rather different things.

This means you'd have to go to the spending bills, one by one--or a 3000 page behemoth that pretty much nobody actually read before voting for or against, besides having their aides check to see if their specific asks and denies were sufficiently accommodated--to see what the language was.