Hello! The big legal news this week was the deal President Trump struck with his own subordinates to create an \u201canti-weaponization fund,\u201d which would allow him to dole out $1.8 billion of taxpayers\u2019 money to allies and supporters, presumably including those who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.<\/p>\n
Critics called this a \u201cslush fund,\u201d which is, when you think about it, an odd phrase. I looked into its origins, which turn out to be nautical<\/a>. Slush is what cooks on ships called the grease and fat left over from cooking meat.<\/p>\n A large frigate could produce 15 or 20 barrels of slush in a year, The Daily National Intelligencer, a Washington newspaper, reported in 1852.<\/p>\n Ships\u2019 crew sold slush to candle makers and others, using the money for small comforts to help pass the time at sea like books and musical instruments. They called this off-the-books account a \u201cslush fund.\u201d<\/p>\n On dry land, the term has taken on negative connotations<\/a>. A slush fund is ordinarily understood to mean a supply of unregulated money of dubious origin used in secret to achieve illicit goals.<\/p>\n Sam Bagenstos, a law professor at the University of Michigan, surveyed the history of the term in \u201c\u2018Slush Funds\u2019 and Congress\u2019s Power of the Purse<\/a>,\u201d which will be published in The U.C. Davis Law Review. He said the term had a specialized meaning in the context of congressional appropriations.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople tend to use the term,\u201d he wrote, \u201cto refer to financing mechanisms that enable the executive branch to evade the usual congressional checks on spending.\u201d<\/p>\n That is what critics say Trump did this week in making a deal with his own Justice Department. <\/p>\n Trump had sued the Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion over what he said was its failure to protect the confidentiality of his tax returns, which were leaked by a former I.R.S. contractor in Trump\u2019s first term. After a judge questioned whether the parties to the suit were actual adversaries, Trump dropped his case.<\/p>\n But the short-lived litigation allowed the parties to announce what they called a \u201csettlement.\u201d It had several curious elements, none of which seemed to follow from the supposed harm to Trump\u2019s privacy resulting from the leak that was the basis of his suit.<\/p>\n The deal called for the creation of a $1.8 billion fund to pay people said to have been the victims of \u201cweaponization\u201d of the Justice Department. The connection to leaked tax data was not obvious.<\/p>\n In an addendum to the deal, Todd Blanche, Trump\u2019s former personal lawyer and the current acting attorney general, purported to grant his boss perpetual immunity from any liability for claims arising from his tax filings. Here, too, the link between what Trump had sued over and the benefit he seeks to obtain is not self-evident.<\/p>\n I explored other aspects of the deal in a news analysis<\/a>. My colleagues had a lot more to say about the arrangement:<\/p>\n Two police officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6 filed a lawsuit<\/a> accusing the administration of creating, yes, a slush fund to reward rioters and groups that committed violence on behalf of Trump.<\/p>\n Rioters themselves were elated by the prospect of a payout<\/a> from the fund.<\/p>\n Blanche defended the deal<\/a> at a congressional hearing.<\/p>\n Lawyers at the I.R.S. were ready to fight Trump\u2019s suit<\/a> and prepared a 25-page memo contesting his legal arguments.<\/p>\n The New York Times\u2019s editorial board weighed in<\/a>. \u201cHas there ever been an episode of presidential corruption so blatant and threatening to constitutional order?\u201d an editorial said. \u201cCertainly not in modern times.\u201d<\/p>\n Mailbag<\/p>\n The \u2018Purcell Principle\u2019: A Shadow Doctrine<\/p>\n This question concerned the Supreme Court\u2019s ruling last month in Louisiana v. Callais<\/a>, which curtailed the Voting Rights Act\u2019s protection of minority voting power and led several states to try to redraw their voting maps:<\/p>\n Given all the frenzied gerrymandering that is happening now in order to have new maps in place for the 2026 midterms, whatever happened to the Purcell principle that the Supreme Court uses to prevent new maps just before an election so as not to confuse voters? \u2014 Ira D. Blecker<\/p>\n In 2006, the Supreme Court issued an unsigned opinion on what critics call its shadow docket. It was called Purcell v. Gonzalez<\/a>, and it gave rise to the \u201cPurcell principle,\u201d a phrase coined by Rick Hasen<\/a>, now a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Purcell principle,\u201d he wrote, is \u201cthe idea that courts should not issue orders which change election rules in the period just before the election.\u201d<\/p>\n Updated\u00a0<\/p>\n May 21, 2026, 2:52 p.m. ET<\/p>\n The ruling itself was unsigned, cryptic, tentative and equivocal. That has been true of many emergency orders issued by the court in recent years. This one gave rise to what Nick Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard, has called a \u201cshadow doctrine.\u201d<\/p>\n The Purcell case concerned an Arizona voter ID law. A trial judge refused to block it, but, about a month before the 2006 general election, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued an injunction forbidding state officials to enforce it.<\/p>\n The Supreme Court, saying the election was \u201cjust weeks\u201d away, let voting proceed with the voter ID law in force.<\/p>\n \u201cCourt orders affecting elections, especially conflicting orders, can themselves result in voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls,\u201d the opinion said. \u201cAs an election draws closer, that risk will increase.\u201d<\/p>\n In an unsigned 2020 opinion<\/a>, the Supreme Court said that Purcell meant that \u201clower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election.\u201d<\/p>\n The justices have sometimes taken a flexible view about what amounts to the eve of an election. In December, they lifted a lower court\u2019s ruling<\/a> that had blocked Texas\u2019 new voting map although Election Day was 11 months away. In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that \u201cthe majority invokes (though without naming) the so-called Purcell principle.\u201d<\/p>\n But the court took a different approach in the aftermath of the Callais decision, notably in Louisiana, where the justices took actions that allowed the rules to be altered in a primary election already underway.<\/p>\n Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, called those developments problematic in an essay<\/a> posted on Tuesday on Scotusblog.<\/p>\n \u201cIt should be deeply troubling that the same justices who created and extended the Purcell principle,\u201d he wrote, \u201cpaid no attention to it whatsoever in handing down a ruling that will dramatically change the conduct of elections that are ongoing.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019d love to hear your questions on the law, the courts or whatever is on your mind. Send them my way at the-docket@nytimes.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n What I\u2019m Reading<\/p>\n \u201cFirst Amendment Inversion,\u201d by Nelson Tebbe, a law professor at Cornell, explores the shifting positions of conservatives and liberals on free speech issues<\/a> in The Texas Law Review.<\/p>\n \u201cTrump v. Barbara: Temporal Territorial Bubbles,\u201d by Joseph J. Donahue, who proposes a new way of looking at birthright citizenship<\/a>, one centered on time.<\/p>\n A new survey<\/a> of judges, lawyers and law professors from Bright Line Watch, a group that monitors the status of American democracy, and the Safeguarding Democracy Project at U.C.L.A. Law found \u201ca significant erosion of the rule of law since Trump returned to office, including politicized law enforcement, a dysfunctional separation of powers and executive-branch overreach.\u201d<\/p>\n Are the Justices\u2019 Papers Public Property?<\/p>\n You can tell the Trump administration is about to lose a case<\/a> when a judge opens his decision with a quotation from George Orwell.<\/p>\n \u201cWho controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past,\u201d Orwell wrote in his novel \u201c1984.\u201d<\/p>\n It was an apt start to an opinion<\/a> from Judge John Bates on Wednesday rejecting a Justice Department memo<\/a> declaring the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional. The act requires the executive branch to preserve materials related to the official responsibilities of the president, and it is based on the premise that presidential papers are government property.<\/p>\n The 52-page memo, from the Justice Department\u2019s Office of Legal Counsel, contested that premise, noting that \u201cover the first two centuries of the American experiment in self-government, presidents owned and controlled presidential papers.\u201d<\/p>\n But the memo\u2019s killer point, featured on its first page and addressed to the body that will probably make the final decision on the status of presidential papers, was this: \u201cJust as Congress could not constitutionally invade the independence of the Supreme Court and expropriate the papers of the chief justice or associate justices, Congress cannot invade the independence of the president and expropriate the papers of the chief executive.\u201d<\/p>\n The justices certainly maintain that their papers are their private property, and they make elaborate arrangements to keep them from public view, generally long after their retirements and deaths. But if Congress can say presidential papers are public property, it may follow that it could say the same thing about the justices\u2019 papers.<\/p>\n Judge Bates did not seem eager to address this argument, relegating it to a footnote on the 40th page of his 54-page decision.<\/p>\n \u201cThe government has suggested that if Congress has the enumerated power to pass a law regulating presidential records, it could also pass a law regulating Supreme Court records,\u201d he wrote. \u201cPerhaps. But that issue is not before the court today.\u201d<\/p>\n He added that the two situations may be different.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the judicial context, courts would have to consider implications of a disclosure provision based on the life tenure of federal judges, the multimember nature of the Supreme Court and the potential impact of disclosure on due process,\u201d Judge Bates wrote. \u201cAnd, of course, the fact that Congress might pass other, unrelated legislation to regulate government records in the future does not bear on its power to pass the law at issue here.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hello! The big legal news this week was the deal President Trump struck with his own subordinates to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":239700,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[18077,93678,24442,83254,1452,85185,29461,1082,9,24,63,134,136,135,24434,24443,1069,90632,1876],"class_list":["post-239699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-staten-island","tag-18077","tag-anti-weaponization-fund-trump-v-irs","tag-blanche","tag-compensation-for-damages-law","tag-donald-j","tag-english-language","tag-internal-revenue-service","tag-justice-department","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-staten-island","tag-staten-island-headlines","tag-staten-island-news","tag-storming-of-the-us-capitol-jan","tag-todd-attorney","tag-trump","tag-trump-tax-returns","tag-united-states-politics-and-government"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239699\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/239700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}