In a decision that some found unexpected, on Wednesday, March 5, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, along with Chief Justice John Roberts, joined the U.S. Supreme Court’s three liberal justices in a 5-4 order that told the Trump administration to direct the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to pay nearly $2 billion in foreign-aid reimbursements for critical work that has already been done.
After the SCOTUS decision on Wednesday, on Thursday, March 6, the issue was bounced back to U.S. District Court Judge Amir H. Ali, who ruled that the Trump and company must pay tens of millions of dollars in outstanding foreign aid by the end of the day, next Monday.
Yet, despite this welcomed step, the fate of hundreds of millions more in spending that is designated for lifesaving food and medicine has yet to be resolved.
As NY Times reporter Adam Liptak pointed out in his story on Wednesday’s decision, the center of the issue at hand is determining the limits of the president’s power to arbitrarily impound money that Congress has previously directed him to spend.
This brings us back to Justice Barrett, who is on the conservative side of the court, and was strongly in favor of the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade. Yet, for those of us who have been reading her concurrences, and other statements made during her time on the court, there is the hope that Barrett’s POV on Wednesday might indicate a potential for legal perspectives that are more nuanced than those of her conservative compatriots when looking at future cases pertaining to the limit of POTUS’s power, and other issues that will require the court to decide whether to put justice and the rule of law above the whims of President Trump, and his chain saw wielding partner.
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Post Script: Perhaps the best person to explain the cost of arbitrarily yanking funding from USAID is surgeon/author Dr. Atul Gawande who is also the former USAID global health assistant administrator. You can find him on the topic here at the New Yorker’s Political Scene podcast.
And, if you want to know still more, tune into to this interview with Dr. Gawande that was broadcast on CNBC earlier this week.
Post Post Script: After the Wednesday’s ruling the vicious and predictable attacks on Justice Barrett began.