Statement on the President’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund”
The Society for the Rule of Law Institute has released the following statement on the president’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund”:
The Society for the Rule of Law Institute categorically condemns the president’s lawless diversion of $1.776 billion of taxpayer money into a slush fund apparently designed to reward political allies and lawbreakers. This settlement should shock the conscience of all Americans. It warrants a swift congressional response and prompt legal challenges to the fullest extent possible.
The Constitution is clear: “no money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law.” Since Congress—and Congress alone—has the power of the purse, only it can authorize “appropriations made by law.” Congress has not approved a penny for this fund, let alone $1.776 billion.
To circumvent the plain text of the Appropriations Clause, the administration relies on the strained example of the Keepseagle litigation, which was settled using the Judgment Fund during the Obama Administration. While widely criticized at the time, that settlement resulted from over a decade of intense litigation and was approved by a federal judge. This Anti-Weaponization Fund, by contrast, stems from a non-adversarial “dispute” that was hastily settled to skirt judicial scrutiny.
The self-dealing, non-adversarial nature of this dispute further compounds its constitutional deficiencies. This is a Trump DOJ settlement of Trump v. Internal Revenue Service; in other words, Donald Trump in his personal capacity versus the Trump Administration’s IRS. By effectively assuming the role of plaintiff, defendant, and arbitrator, President Trump flouts both Article III’s adversarial “case or controversy” requirement and the indispensable rule of law maxim that “no man should be a judge in his own cause.”
This settlement amounts to a wealth transfer from American taxpayers to the president’s most ardent supporters—including, potentially, those who stormed the Capitol on January 6th. Not content to just enrich his supporters, however, the president also smuggled in a perpetual immunity from IRS audits for himself, his family, and his businesses. It is hard to imagine a more transparent corruption of the public fisc. The Supreme Court, in FAA v. Cooper (2012), rejected precisely such profligate exposure of the Treasury to damages from an alleged privacy violation resulting from a leak of confidential personal data. We thus applaud Treasury Department General Counsel Brian Morrissey for resigning over this abuse.
The Orwellian nature of this fund underscores its outrageousness. This “Anti-Weaponization Fund” is being spearheaded by a Department of Justice that cavalierly targets its political opponents. And by setting its value at $1.776 billion, the Fund invokes the American Revolution, which expressly repudiated the kind of one-man rule that this settlement perpetrates.
Everything about this fund is wholly incompatible with the ideals animating that Revolution. The Society for the Rule of Law Institute urges it to be immediately dissolved.
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