On Monday morning, attorneys for the President filed a notice of voluntary dismissal in the Southern District of Florida, ending Trump v. Internal Revenue Service. Hours later, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that the Department of Justice was creating an Anti-Weaponization Fund of $1.776 billion as part of the settlement. By the close of business, Judge Kathleen Williams had closed the case and recorded that she was “stripped of jurisdiction” because the agreement was never docketed. There is no settlement of record. There is only the money to be deposited within sixty days into a Treasury account that six unnamed administrators will hand out as they see fit.
Read that paragraph twice. The president filed a ten-billion-dollar lawsuit against an agency he controls. His administration defended the agency he controls. His Justice Department then settled the case by appropriating two billion dollars to a fund that his Justice Department also controls. The federal judge tasked with reviewing the deal was told the deal had never officially existed in her courtroom, and concluded she therefore had nothing to review. The plaintiff, the defendant, and the disbursing officer were the same person all along.
This is not corruption inside a working system. It is what the architecture of the Republic looks like once the load-bearing walls are removed.
Article III of the Constitution restricts federal courts to “Cases” and “Controversies.” The word controversy carries a precise legal meaning: adverse parties, with genuine and opposing interests, asking a court to resolve their dispute. The doctrine exists because the framers understood that a court hearing a fake quarrel is not a court. It is a stage. Whatever judgment emerges from such a proceeding cannot bind anyone, because no one was actually contesting anything. Trump, as head of the executive branch, possessed direct authority over the IRS the moment he was inaugurated. His suit against that agency had been constitutionally dead since January. Ninety-three House Democrats spelled this out in their amicus brief: no one can be both plaintiff and defendant. Jamie Raskin put it more plainly. The case was never a case. The controversy was a costume.