Thread by @hsu_spencer

NEW U.S. judge sharply challenges Democratic-led House lawsuit to stop Trump border wall construction, as senior Justice Dept. attorney asserts Congress cannot sue the president, and courts should stay out of political disputes wapo.st/2QlgjYc

Deputy Assistant AG James Burnham argued president is legally transferring money under other laws that Congress has approved, adding:
“For over 200 years of our Constitution’s history, Congress and the executive branch resolved their political disputes through political means.”

Burnham, a former associate Trump White House counsel, said the nation’s founders would have been “horrified’ and “appalled” at lawmakers trying to get the courts to take their side in such a dispute, “making the president subservient to the courts.”

Going further, DOJ's Burnham said only in the last 50 years have courts allowed the House or Senate to sue to enforce subpoenas, rulings he argued should be overturned: “The Constitution nowhere even hints at the possibility of interbranch litigation.”

House General Counsel Douglas Letter argued that Congress had made clear no additional money should go to the border wall over a 35-day government shutdown, “The president in this instance is going to the very heart of our check and balances....

"We cannot — and our Framers would have stood up and applauded me on this — we cannot have the president appropriating money,” Letter said. He said Burnham’s proposed solution — pass another law — was nonsensical, because Congress did pass a law, which the president flouted.

“I’m fairly sure that if you asked any American, ‘Did Congress deny the president the funds he requested?’, the answer would have to be, ‘Yeah, don’t you know what deny means?”

Letter said when the executive and legislative branches are at loggerheads on what a key issue of the constitution means, "the Supreme Court is perfectly comfortable telling us what the law means . . . and both branches, I believe, have universally followed what it says."