Court approves diverting $2.5 billion for border wall

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday handed President Donald Trump a major victory by clearing the way for him to divert $2.5 billion from the military’s budget and use it to build an extra 100 miles of border wall in California, Arizona and New Mexico.

The justices, by a vote of 5-4, lifted orders by a federal judge in Oakland, California, and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco that had barred the administration from using the Pentagon’s money to build a border wall.

Conservative justices questioned whether the environmental groups challenging Trump’s wall had standing. The court’s four liberal justices dissented.

Trump’s lawyers had asked the high court to intervene, saying it faced a Sept. 30 deadline to spend $2.5 billion from the Pentagon’s budget before the fiscal year ended and the money was no longer available.

Lower courts had said Trump’s move to divert the money was an end run around Congress, which had specifically refused to allocate money for a wall.

“The Constitution assigns to Congress the power of the purse,” the 9th Circuit said July 3 in upholding the injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam Jr. “It is Congress that is to make decisions regarding how to spend taxpayer dollars.”

The president and Congress deadlocked over the border wall earlier this year. It led to a 35-day partial government shutdown which ended in February with a budget deal that included only $1.4 billion for border security, but nothing for a wall. It was well short of the $5.7 billion Trump had sought for a wall.

After signing the deal, the president declared a national emergency and said he had the authority to transfer already appropriated funds to extend the border wall.

Lawyers for the Sierra Club, the Southern Border Communities Coalition and the ACLU sued, arguing that construction of a 30-foot high wall would harm wildlife and damage the environment in remote areas.

In the past two years, U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco has repeatedly gone directly to the Supreme Court to challenge orders issued by district judges in fast-moving cases. Normally, the high court chooses to review cases only after they have been resolved in the lower courts.

But Francisco asked the justices again to get involved, noting the growing of nationwide injunctions that have blocked executive proclamations or regulations issued by the Trump administration.

His appeal in Trump vs. Sierra Club contended the border wall was needed to combat drug smuggling. The Sierra Club’s “interest in hiking, birdwatching and fishing in designated drug-smuggling corridors do not outweigh the harm to the public from halting the government’s efforts to construct barriers to staunch the flow of illegal narcotics across the southern border,” he said.

According to the Defense Department, he said, the disputed funds “will no longer remain available for obligation after the fiscal year ends on September 30, 2019.”

In response, the Sierra Club said the court should not allow the administration “to swiftly spend billions of dollars that Congress denied.” To do so would show “the shutdown was essentially a charade,” the lawyers said.