Emoluments Clause

Court right to toss out lawsuit against Trump

Until Donald Trump was elected president and took office earlier this year, few Americans had ever heard of or paid much attention to a passage in the Constitution known as the “Emoluments Clause.”

“No person holding any office or profit of trust under [the United States] shall, without the consent of Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state,” the clause reads.

The idea was that a president could not receive money, payments, earnings, gifts or other favors from foreign leaders. Such “emoluments” could sway the judgement of the chief executive.

Well, shortly after President Trump took office, The Center for Responsibility and Ethics, located in Washington, filed a lawsuit charging he was in violation of the clause since he owned hotels. Their position is that foreign officials could stay in those hotels hoping to curry favor with the president. Trump would therefore be “earning” from foreign nations.

We thought the idea was bunk then and still do. Trump rents hotel rooms, all sorts of people pay to occupy hotel rooms. That’s a commercial exchange, not a bribe. And in any case, it’s far removed from the White House. Now a court agrees as well. On Friday, a federal district judge ruled CREW had no standing to bring the lawsuit. If the president was indeed violating the Emoluments Clause, that was a matter for Congress to take up.

A spokesperson for CREW said there will be an appeal. Of course there will. And both Maryland and the District of Columbia, each with their own emoluments laws, are suing President Trump because their convention centers and other facilities are losing money to Trump-owned venues! We’ll have to wait and see how that works out.

In our view, the Founders did not intend for the Emoluments Clause to put a president out of private businesses he owned before taking office. They didn’t want foreign powers influencing the president through bribes, titles and the like. We hope on appeal the court sees things the same way.