Thursday, May 14, 2026

🚀🧪

 So it seems this is what the NYT was talking about:

"According to Andrew Duehren and Alan Feuer of The New York Times, a settlement is in the works that would drop any IRS audits of Trump, his family, or his businesses," wrote Noah. "One advantage to this approach is that it would spare Trump having to pretend he’ll donate the proceeds to charity.

"Since nobody knows what the penalties from such audits would be, nobody can pinpoint such a settlement’s monetary value." Indeed, Noah wrote, it's possible Trump's lawyers want "some sort of indemnification against future IRS action akin to the blanket immunity the Supreme Court gifted him in 2024."
Not an end run on the court to get $10 billion in Trump’s pocket (an amount that would still have to be authorized by Congress, bugger the emoluments clause),* but an agreement to not audit Trump and his companies.

Unless that’s some kind of court order, the next administration could direct the IRS to follow the money. But a binding court order on that is as problematic as a court sanctioned monetary settlement, because there’s a very serious question of jurisdiction.

So, despite the screaming and shouting and hair pulling, I don’t see how Trump wins this one. He can authorize a settlement, but he can’t fund it. Only Congress can. Trump can’t direct the IRS to turn over the money it doesn’t have, or tell Treasury to cut him a check out of general funds. Only Congress can authorize that.

I get the power of the political argument here; but this kind of ignorance about how government functions is how we elected Trump. Twice.

Government simply doesn’t work this way; and if it does, it is corrupt beyond redemption. A CEO couldn’t authorize the funds to settle a PI claim he had against the corporation before he became CEO. If he did, there would be something irredeemably corrupt about that corporation.

But unlike the CEO, Trump doesn’t even have access to the checkbook. Nor does the SOT. The government can only spend the money it is allocated and authorized to spend. Even the local school district here has budgeted amounts for every department in administration. If that budget is exceeded, money is moved from another budget, or the purchase simply isn’t made. There isn’t anywhere in a government budget where $10 billion is authorized “in case of settlements.” That kind of payout would take authorization from someone well above the person signing the settlement documents. In this case, it would take a vote of Congress.

It isn’t rocket science to figure out Trump is ignorantly prating again. And it actually just further decreases understanding of what government is, and what it does, to play the game by Trump’s rules. It’s just making it that much harder to get past his corruption and destruction, and get back to having a government that works for us.

*
There's also a chance that Judge Kathleen Williams could block a settlement from happening at all — but if she throws out the lawsuit altogether, as she seems to be considering, "it’s not clear anything can stop the IRS from settling with Trump at that point, except possibly another lawsuit brought on behalf of taxpayers arguing that Trump’s in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses" — and in Trump's last term, the Supreme Court sat on emoluments litigation until it died.
No, it’s very clear the IRS can’t just hand Trump $10 billion, and the emoluments clause has bugger all to do with it. Trump’s not the only blithering idiot in this conversation. (The Congress can, for example, authorize $1 billion for the ballroom. Are they likely to do so? Signs point to “No.” They can also block construction of the ballroom, despite the “donations” no one knows anything concrete about. Will they? It’s almost a certainty in 2027.)

I have now beaten this dead horse as much as I can.

CODA: I would rather treat Trump as the incompetent boob he is, rather than the nefarious axe murderer who is going to kill our democracy in its bed.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)