Supreme Court justice temporarily pauses order requiring Trump administration to fully fund SNAP by end of Friday
https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-admi...y?id=127294307
At issue was whether a federal judge can compel the government to use $4 billion from Section 32 of the Agricultural Adjustment Act Amendment of 1935 to fund November SNAP benefits.
"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,"
The Trump administration says the Section 32 funds are needed to support WIC programs and that using that money to pay for SNAP would essentially "starve Peter to feed Paul."
"Indeed, if every beneficiary of a mandatory spending program could run to court and force the agency to transfer funds from elsewhere, the result would be an unworkable and conflicting plethora of injunctions that reduce the federal fisc to a giant shell game," they argued in a court filing.
Appealing to the Supreme Court on Friday night, the Justice Department argued the funding lapse is a crisis only Congress can solve.
And unless the Supreme Court steps in, they told the justices, every beneficiary of a federal program could run into court to try to get funding, inviting a “run on the bank by way of judicial fiat.”
"The core power of Congress is that of the purse, while the Executive is tasked with allocating limited resources across competing priorities," the Justice Department said in its appeal. "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."
<raises hand> I know this one...
