Dem
47
GOP
53
As you might remember, when Elon Musk and his DOGEys were trying to destroy run the government early in Trump
v2.0, one of the areas where hundreds of grants were axed was those from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Many of the groups that lost their grants sued. On Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Colleen McMahon
ruled
that those cuts were illegal and unconstitutional.
The judge didn't rely primarily on the Watergate-era anti-impoundment law that states a president may not refuse to spend funds that Congress has appropriated just because he or people in his administration don't like Congress' goals. Instead, she ruled based on the First Amendment and Fifth Amendment, calling the case "a textbook example of viewpoint discrimination."
She also revealed how the DOGEys picked grants to kill. They asked ChatGPT which grants would promote diversity, equity, and inclusion and let it bring down the axe. Needless to say, letting some AI bot make decisions to kill programs Congress has mandated has no basis in law or anything else. In most cases, the 20-something kids who dreamed up this scheme knew nothing about the humanities and certainly had no authority to let some bot decide which programs lived and which ones died. Some of the grants that the bot killed were ones to provide education about the Holocaust at Seton Hall University, a virtual reality demonstration of Indigenous culture at the Mesa Verde National Park, and a book about HIV in prisons. ChatGPT didn't like them, so poof! Gone!
White House spokesman Davis Ingle said of the ruling: "The district court's ruling is egregiously wrong. It conflicts with clear Supreme Court precedent, and provides yet another example of liberal judges trying to reinstate wasteful federal spending at the expense of the American taxpayer." However, in 1975, in Train v. City of New York, the Supreme Court held that the president cannot withhold funds Congress has mandated for spending. Trump wants to get that overturned, but that hasn't happened yet. The case may end up in the Supreme Court, which of course would give the Court a chance at throwing away another 50-year-old precedent in order to placate Trump. (V)