This archive report was first published on 27 July 2019.
On July 26, 2019, a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco refused to stay Judge Gilliam's injunction while the court considered the government's appeal.
The court's majority stated that the public interest was best served by respecting the Constitution's assignment of the power of the purse to Congress and deferring to Congress's understanding of the public interest as reflected in its repeated denial of more funding for border barrier construction.
On July 19, 2019, Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco urged the Supreme Court to intercede, arguing that the plaintiffs' interests in hiking, bird watching, and fishing in designated drug-smuggling corridors did not outweigh the harm to the public from halting the government's efforts to construct barriers to stanch the flow of illegal narcotics across the southern border.
Mr. Francisco argued that the lower courts had misread two provisions of a federal law in concluding that the transfer was not authorized. The law allows reallocation of money to address 'unforeseen military requirements' where the expenditures had not already been 'denied by Congress.'
However, the A.C.L.U. responded that the central issue in the case was straightforward: the administration lacked authority to spend taxpayer funds on a wall that Congress considered and denied.
As recently as February 2019, the country endured the longest government shutdown in its history due to Congress's refusal to appropriate funds for the wall construction at issue here.
