Republican Senator Files Amicus Brief Against Anti-Weaponization Fund, Calling It an ‘Immediate and Dire Threat’

A Republican lawmaker, Senator Bill Cassidy, is calling on a federal judge to declare President Trump’s “anti-weaponization fund” illegal. Dr. Cassidy says the fund — which the Justice Department says is no longer being set up — “presents an immediate and dire threat to our constitutional order.”Dr. Cassidy is being forced into retirement this year after Mr. Trump backed one of the senator’s primary challengers, Congresswoman Julia Letlow. Dr. Cassidy placed in third, meaning Ms. Letlow and state treasurer John Fleming will head to a runoff for that primary. After he was defeated last month, the Justice Department announced that it had settled Mr. Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit for an illegal disclosure of his tax returns. As part of that settlement, Mr. Trump, his family, and his business are now immune from future IRS audits. More troubling for senators, however, was the presence of a $1.776 anti-weaponization fund meant to compensate those who faced scrutiny from the federal government. There were no guardrails on who was eligible to receive money and the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, repeatedly declined to rule out payments for those who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In an amicus brief submitted to a federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia, Dr. Cassidy and his Democratic colleague, Senator Cory Booker, argued that the fund is a clear end-run around Congress’s power of the purse. The ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund’ constitutes an improper and unconstitutional transfer of taxpayer dollars, including to those who engaged in a violent insurrection against the United States and its democratically elected representatives — including the United States Senate — on January 6,2021,” Dr. Cassidy and Mr. Booker’s attorneys argue in the brief. “The Anti-Weaponization Fund presents an immediate and dire threat to our constitutional order and the authority of Congress,” the lawyers write. “Indeed, among other purposes, the Fund is designed to compensate the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.”“The existence of the Fund strikes at the core of Congressional authority and our Constitutional order,” they argue. Dr. Cassidy has been outspoken about the fund for weeks, saying it is both fiscally and morally unwise to issue such payments with no guardrails in place. He and other Republicans have argued that if people have really faced government abuse, then they can simply go through the normal process of seeking compensation. The Senate is currently considering a nearly $70 billion immigration enforcement funding bill — something Dr. Cassidy wants to use as a vehicle to ban the creation of any such anti-weaponization funds in the future. Two vulnerable GOP lawmakers up for re-election this year, Senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska and Senator Jon Husted of Ohio, are also interested in some kind of solution to block these kinds of judgment funds. In their argument brief, attorneys for Dr. Cassidy and Mr. Booker say that the fund cannot be used in any way, given its threats to both the Constitution and the laws of the land. “To deliberately deploy public funds, in violation of the Constitution and the laws of this nation, to compensate these perpetrators is to use the machinery of democratic government to subsidize an attack on that government’s most fundamental processes,” Dr. Cassidy and Mr. Booker’s lawyers write. “Congress itself, as both victim and the federal government’s sole appropriating authority, has a compelling institutional interest in ensuring that no public fund is converted into a reward for those who laid siege to it,” they conclude.

Republican Senator Files Amicus Brief Against Anti-Weaponization Fund, Calling It an ‘Immediate and Dire Threat’

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