May 20, 2025 12:58 PM UTC

You Need to Know About this Scary Addition to House GOP Budget Bill

• 6 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

House Republicans continue to push forward with a massive budget proposal that would fund President Trump’s tax cuts for rich people largely by gutting Medicaid and other critical government programs such as SNAP (food stamps). Over the weekend, House Republicans hammered through a (potential) resolution that satisfied most hard-right conservatives, though negotiations continue as House Speaker Mike Johnson tries to meet his self-imposed Memorial Day deadline for final passage of Trump’s “big beautiful bill.”

But there is a scary addition to the budget bill that was somehow included over the weekend that isn’t getting enough attention. As Erwin Chemerinsky writes for “Just Security“:

A provision in the proposed spending bill would restrict the authority of federal courts to hold government officials in contempt when they violate court orders. Without the contempt power, judicial orders are meaningless and can be ignored.

There is no way to understand this except as a way to keep the Trump administration from being restrained when it violates the Constitution or otherwise breaks the law. The House and the Senate should reject this effort to limit judicial power… [Pols emphasis]

…The provision in the proposed budget reconciliation bill states: “No court of the United States may use appropriated funds to enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c), whether issued prior to, on, or subsequent to the date of enactment of this section.”

By its very terms this provision is meant to limit the power of federal courts to use their contempt power. It does so by relying on a relatively rarely used provision of the Rules that govern civil cases in federal court. Rule 65(c) says that judges may issue a preliminary injunction or a temporary restraining order “only if the movant gives security in an amount that the court considers proper to pay the costs and damages sustained by any party found to have been wrongfully enjoined or restrained.”

The Trump administration has run into numerous legal challenges as it tries to enact various policy changes, particularly in the areas of immigration policy and in relation to massive cuts to government agencies. Americans largely agree with the idea that we should have a functioning Judicial Branch in this country and that the President should have to abide by the separation of powers laid out in the U.S. Constitution. But Republicans — including noted Constitutional scholar Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Weld County) — want to allow Trump to govern like a dictator.

As The Associated Press reports:

Tucked deep in the thousand-plus pages of the multitrillion-dollar budget bill making its way through the Republican-controlled U.S. House is a paragraph curtailing a court’s greatest tool for forcing the government to obey its rulings: the power to enforce contempt findings. [Pols emphasis]

It’s unclear whether the bill can pass the House in its current form — it failed in a committee vote Friday — whether the U.S. Senate would preserve the contempt provision or whether courts would uphold it. But the fact that GOP lawmakers are including it shows how much those in power in the nation’s capital are thinking about the consequences of defying judges as the battle between the Trump administration and the courts escalates.

Republican President Donald Trump raised the stakes again Friday when he attacked the U.S. Supreme Court for its ruling barring his administration from quickly resuming deportations under an 18th-century wartime law: “THE SUPREME COURT WON’T ALLOW US TO GET CRIMINALS OUT OF OUR COUNTRY!” Trump posted on his social media network, Truth Social.

If a federal judge cannot enforce contempt findings as a method of requiring elected officials to abide by legal decisions, then the Trump administration can just completely ignore any rulings that get in the way of their proposals.

Decimating Medicaid coverage for millions of Americans would be a catastrophe that would increase health care costs for everyone. This is reason enough to oppose the House GOP budget proposal.

Restricting the ability of courts to enforce contempt findings is a terrifying idea that is akin to lighting the Constitution on fire. That such an idea would even make it into writing is a travesty.