National Review Online
Sunday, September 06, 2020
Andrew Cuomo can relax. President Trump’s theatrical
threat to defund New York and other jurisdictions wracked by rioting isn’t
going to amount to much.
In the middle of an intense feud with Cuomo, the
president signed a memorandum last week purporting to punish select cities for
their ineffectual response to disorder. The spirit of the memorandum runs
counter to the Constitution, which gives Congress the spending power, although
the letter of the memo is limited to the point of meaninglessness.
Addressed to Attorney General William Barr and Office of
Management and Budget (OMB) director Russell Vought, the memorandum orders a
review of federal funding sent to state and local governments that are, as the
memorandum puts it, “permitting anarchy, violence, and destruction in American
cities.” Specifically, Trump admonishes the leadership in Seattle, Portland,
New York City, and Washington, D.C., for their failure to reestablish order
within their respective jurisdictions, resulting in “persistent and outrageous
acts of violence and destruction.”
Trump directs the attorney general to compile this list
by evaluating whether local officials have stopped their “police force from
intervening to restore order,” “withdrawn law enforcement protection from a
geographical area or structure,” “disempower[ed] or defund[ed] police
departments,” or “unreasonably refus[ed] to accept offers of law enforcement
assistance from the Federal Government.” States and localities places on the
list are deemed “anarchist jurisdictions.”
The director of the OMB is to then use the attorney
general’s determinations to make some of his own. He must “issue guidance to
the heads of agencies on restricting eligibility of or otherwise disfavoring,
to the maximum extent permitted by law, anarchist jurisdictions in the receipt
of Federal grants that the agency has sufficient lawful discretion to restrict
or otherwise disfavor anarchist jurisdictions from receiving.”
The key phrases are “to the maximum extent permitted by
law,” and “sufficient lawful discretion,” which will, if followed, prevent any
wholesale defunding of the cities in question.
The administration’s attempted defunding of disorderly
cities will probably follow the course of its attempted defunding of sanctuary
cities. The administration found that there wasn’t much funding it could
plausibly try to cut off. Even the relatively minor grants it targeted have
been caught up in the courts, which have often ruled that the executive can’t
put conditions on funding that Congress hasn’t already written into law.
If the memorandum ends up being only a glorified press
release, that’s better than the alternative, but it’d be even better if the
president didn’t purport to have powers that he doesn’t.
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