In case you missed it, when the House passed Donald Trump’s Billionaires’ Budget Bill, it included a Trump-requested provision limiting the power of federal judges to hold people in contempt, potentially giving the Felon 47 administration the ability to violate court orders with impunity.
Some Republicans claimed they wouldn’t have supported that provision had they known what they voted for what was in it, USA Today noted.
So, the Senate came up with a workaround for Dear Leader: A proposed provision making it prohibitively expensive to challenge Trump’s authoritarian rule.
HuffPost explains:
This bill would require that anyone seeking a temporary restraining order or a preliminary injunction against the federal government first post a bond that covers the costs and damages that would be sustained to the federal government, in the event it loses the case. We’re talking millions if not billions of dollars being required upfront, effectively shutting off people’s ability to sue the Trump administration.
“The court must set the bond at an amount that’s really large,” said Coby Dolan, legislative director of the Access to Justice program at Earthjustice Action. the nonprofit advocacy partner to Earthjustice, a public interest environmental law group. “In some of these federal actions, the federal government could say, ‘It’s going to cost $1 billion.’ What public interest group is going to be able to afford a $1 billion bond?”
This language is narrower than the provision in the House bill ― it only applies to the federal government and temporary restraining orders or preliminary injunctions ― and it is not retroactive. But it would make it exponentially harder, if not impossible, for people to bring lawsuits against the government.
USA Today pointed out that the provision in the Senate draft “reflects the support of leadership to include and defend it.”
In case the prospect of tossing millions off health insurance for the sake of bigger tax cuts for billionaires wasn’t enough to get you to call your members of Congress and oppose the Trump budget, maybe the prospect of senators effectively pre-rubber stamping his unlawful actions will.
