A federal judge in Rhode Island issued a ruling today that the Trump administration has failed to comply with his previous ruling on releasing funds appropriated by Congress. This puts us in view of what some would consider a constitutional crisis. You have two independent branches of the government that don't seem to be cooperating with each other. 

In this case, the Trump administration's freeze on spending was ordered lifted by this same judge on Jan. 29. The Trump administration immediately appealed.

Shortly after the ruling, administration lawyers appealed his initial order to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, asking the appellate court to pause Judge McConnell’s order to keep federal funds flowing while their case was being considered. The White House responded defiantly.

“Each executive order will hold up in court because every action of the Trump-Vance administration is completely lawful,” Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said. “Any legal challenge against it is nothing more than an attempt to undermine the will of the American people.”

The administration has the right to appeal but the question is whether or not the administration is complying with the judge's order in the meantime. A group of Democratic AG's led by Rob Bonta of California went back to the same judge arguing that the administration was not complying. Yesterday, Trump's DOJ responded, saying that it has sought to comply with the order but that there was one area which they did not believe was covered by the judge's original order because it involved a different executive order issued by the President and not the one involved in the original order.

Defendants respectfully submit that the actions described below do not run afoul of the Court’s injunction, or at least not a “clear and unambiguous command” in the Court’s injunction.  Rather, they represent good-faith, diligent efforts to comply with the injunction across the broad spectrum of Federal financial assistance implicated by the Court’s Order.  Thus, Defendants’ actions are consistent with the Court’s Order, and Plaintiffs’ motion should be denied. 

But in the order issued today, Judge McConnell sided with the AGs and said the administration must comply with his TRO as applying to any freeze of funding.

The States have presented evidence in this motion that the Defendants in some cases have continued to improperly freeze federal funds and refused to resume disbursement of appropriated federal funds. The Defendants now plea that they are just trying to root out fraud. But the freezes in effect now were a result of the broad categorical order, not a specific finding of possible fraud.  The broad categorical and sweeping freeze of federal funds is, as the Court found, likely unconstitutional and has caused and continues to cause irreparable harm to a vast portion of this country. These pauses in funding violate the plain text of the TRO...

The Defendants must immediately restore frozen funding during the pendency of the TRO until the Court hears and decides the Preliminary Injunction request...

The Defendants must immediately restore withheld funds, including those federal funds appropriated in the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Improvement and Jobs Act.  The directives in OMB M-25-11 are included in the TRO.

In effect, the judge is saying that efforts to comply with his previous order were not sufficient and he is now demanding they do so. The question is what happens next. If the White House complies with the order then we don't have a constitutional crisis we have a disagreement that was resolved by the order issued today. If however, the White House refuses to comply with the new order then we are in constitutional crisis territory as the judge could try to enforce his order with fines or even jailing Trump's cabinet secretaries.

Going forward, if Judge McConnell finds that the government is still ignoring his initial order, he could order more than a dozen administration officials named in the lawsuit to explain why they should not be held in contempt of court, and then punish them with imprisonment, or, more likely, fines paid by their agencies, according to Adam Winkler, a professor at U.C.L.A law school...

David A. Super, a professor at Georgetown Law, said that he had heard directly from a number of groups, both inside and outside of government, that said their funding was still frozen.

“If you or I did this, the judge’s clerk would be on the phone saying bring your toothbrush to the hearing to show cause because you might not be coming home tonight,” he said. “This is the federal government, so the judge is trying to show restraint — expressing anger and reiterating its order, but not immediately bringing up penalties.”

Trump's spokesman may be right that, ultimately, he is going t win many of these battles in court but that doesn't mean he can ignore the judge's order in the meantime. So we'll have to wait and see what happens, but clearly the Democratic AG's would be happy to have Trump's efforts further entangled with the courts in a way that hand Democrats an issue they can use against these efforts. Longer term, this is probably an area where cooler heads need to prevail in order to reach the White House's desired outcome.