In a 1985 memo to the White House’s top lawyer, now 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’s 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.
In a 1985 communiqué unearthed by us, Roberts weighed in on a question from Reagan’s staff secretary, David Chew, about a president’s alleged power to block — or, in budget terms, impound — spending legislated by Congress.
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.”
Roberts added:
We should discourage Chew and others from considering impoundment as a viable budget planning option. Our institutional vigilance with respect to the constitutional prerogatives of the presidency requires appropriate deference to the constitutional prerogatives of the other branches, and no area seems more clearly the province of Congress than the power of the purse.
According to Daniel Schuman, an attorney and executive director of the American Governance Institute, which advocates for government transparency, Roberts’s writing on the matter is clear.
“John Roberts’ August…
Auteur: David Sirota
