SCOTUSblog by Amy Howe 7/22/2020
It has been just under a year since a divided Supreme Court
allowed the government to spend federal funds on the construction of President Donald Trump’s border wall while a legal challenge proceeded. Opponents of the wall returned to the Supreme Court on Wednesday, asking the justices to revisit the issue and order a temporary halt to the construction. Otherwise, they argued, the government will achieve “a complete victory despite having lost in every court,†because it will be able to finish the parts of the wall that are the subject of the ongoing litigation before that litigation concludes.
Wednesday’s
filing from the Sierra Club and the Southern Borders Communities Coalition is the latest development in the dispute over funding for the wall along the U.S. border with Mexico. The groups sued to stop the wall last year, arguing that government officials did not have the power to spend more than Congress had already allocated for border security. In particular, the plaintiffs contended, the government could not spend $2.5 billion originally earmarked for military-personnel funds, which the Department of Defense had redirected to counter-narcotics funds so that the money could be used for the wall.
After a federal district judge in California blocked the government from using the Pentagon funds for construction of the wall, the government asked the Supreme Court last July to step in and allow it to move forward while it appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. It cited both border security – the need to “stanch the flow of illegal narcotics across the southern border†– and the prospect that the funds for construction could disappear if construction contracts were not finalized by the time the government’s fiscal year ended on Sept. 30, 2019. The Supreme Court granted the government’s request and issued a stay of the district judge’s order. The government quickly moved forward with construction.
More:
https://www.scotusblog.com/2020/07/opponents-of-border-wall-ask-court-to-lift-year-old-stay-and-halt-construction/
