A single district court in Rhode Island should not be able to seize center stage in the shutdown, seek to upend political negotiations that could produce swift political solutions for SNAP and other programs, and dictate its own preferences for how scarce federal funds should be spent.
With hours to go before the TRO compliance clock runs, and the First Circuit waiting to deny immediate relief until minutes ago, we have filed an emergency stay application in the Supreme Court requesting immediate relief.
As our Supreme Court brief puts it:
“The core power of Congress is that of the purse, while the Executive is tasked with allocating limited resources across competing priorities. But here, the court below took the current shutdown as effective license to declare a federal bankruptcy and appoint itself the trustee, charged with picking winners and losers among those seeking some part of the limited pool of remaining federal funds.”
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
.@TheJusticeDept just filed a request for an immediate stay of Judge McConnell’s utterly lawless Temporary Restraining Order issued yesterday after business hours—yet remarkably forcing @USDA to “raid school-lunch money to instead fund SNAP benefits.” That TRO purports to force the government to divert some $5 billion from the school lunch program to SNAP by the end of today.
Why could we file this brief only this morning, with that clock ticking? The First Circuit clerk’s office made it impossible to file sooner. Despite being notified by the government of the high likelihood of fast-moving litigation, the First Circuit clerk’s office refused to answer its phones until this morning, and refused to offer any means of filing this emergency request until it processed certain paperwork during regular business hours.
So, Judge McConnell exacerbated his own manufactured emergency by starting the government’s clock just after the First Circuit closed for the day, forcing an even faster rush today to disadvantage the government further.