200 Congress Members File a Lawsuit Against the President

This Wednesday, about 200 Democratic members of congress filed a federal law suit accusing President Trump of violating the constitution. He is being accused of profiting from business dealings with foreign governments.

It is believed that this is the greatest number of congress members to ever file a law suit against a sitting President. The plaintiffs argue that Trump blatantly ignored a constitutional clause that forbids federal officials from accepting gifts or emoluments from foreign powers without receiving approval from congress first.

This is the third law suit that has been filed against the current president since he took office. It is part of a joint effort by Trump’s critics to push him to reveal more information about his business affairs, and either put his holdings in a blind trust or sell them off.

This law suit, similar to the two previous ones, filed in Washington’s federal court, accuses the President profiting from business in a variety of illegal ways. This has included collecting payments from foreign diplomats that have stayed in his hotels, as well as accepting trademark approvals from foreign governments for his own company’s goods and services.

Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, who led this effort with Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan says that Democratic members of the house and senate claim that they have been wrongly deprived of their constitutional right to rule on whether or not the President can actually accept any kind of economic benefit from foreign governments.

In the law suit it states that, “The founders ensured that federal officeholders would not decide for themselves whether particular emoluments were likely to compromise their own independence or lead them to put personal interest over national interest,” and that, “An officeholder, in short, should not be the sole judge of his own integrity.”

The standing President faces three distinct groups of legal opponents. Each group claims that the president’s actions have hurt them in a different way. Private individuals that own hotels and restaurants argue that they are competing with Trump’s and have joined a lawsuit filed in federal court in New York by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, a nonprofit watchdog group.

This past Monday, the attorney general of Maryland and the District of Columbia filed a suit within the federal court of Maryland, which accuses the President of putting resorts, hotels, and convention centers that are operated and owned by their own government at a competitive disadvantage. Several legal experts have urged that the law suit is likely to proceed due to the “coequal sovereign” of the president and state.

Critics of the President hope to find a judge that will sympathize with the position posed by the plaintiffs enough to allow the case to proceed further.

Every new group of plaintiffs makes it more difficult for the Justice Department to defend Trump on the account that they have no legal standing to sue the president.

Norman Eisen, the chairman of CREW, states that, “It puts the government in the position of saying that nobody can address this — not hotel competitors, not states, not members of Congress,” and that “And you cannot get away with that in a rule-of-law system.”

Justice Department lawyers, in response to the initial lawsuit, have claimed that the original framers of the Constitution had never intended to prevent the standing president from owning their own business, or to ban ordinary, arms length commercial transactions.