Adam Smith, Kyle Skinner  //  4/24/19  //  Daily Update

The post-Mueller cold war between President Trump and House Democrats intensified on Tuesday, as the President indicated that he would fight any Congressional requests for additional information or testimony related to the Special Counsel’s investigation. The White House reportedly plans to invoke executive privilege to prevent former White House Counsel Donald McGahn from testifying before the House Judiciary Committee. After hearing oral argument in a challenge to the Commerce Department’s addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, the Supreme Court seems poised to rule in the Department’s favor. And the House sought a preliminary injunction to bar President Trump from using military funding to build a wall on the nation’s southern border.

TRUMP: INVESTIGATIONS AND LITIGATION

As the House of Representatives seeks to tie up the Mueller Report’s loose ends, the White House indicated on Tuesday that it plans to fight back — and that it was preparing for a protracted battle over the breadth of Congress’s oversight authority.

• In an interview with The Washington Post, President Trump suggested that he would not accede to any further requests for information or testimony related to the Special Counsel’s investigation, calling the House’s investigatory efforts “obviously very partisan” (WaPo).
• The President reportedly plans to invoke executive privilege to prevent former White House Counsel Donald McGahn from testifying before the House Judiciary Committee (WaPo; NYT).
• And White House officials have reportedly instructed current and former aides not to comply with Congressional subpoenas (WaPo).

The President’s attempts to hinder the Mueller investigation — unsuccessful though they were — likely provided Congress with sufficient grounds for bringing articles of impeachment, argues Adam Liptak at The New York Times.

IMMIGRATION

The House of Representatives asked a Washington, D.C., federal court to enjoin the Trump administration from reappropriating defense funds to pay for its long-promised border wall (Politico).

• The House’s application for a preliminary injunction is available here.

DEMOCRACY

The Supreme Court heard oral argument in Department of Commerce v. New York, the much-anticipated challenge to the Trump administration’s addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 Census (The Hill, Economist).

• The transcript from Tuesday’s argument is available here.
• Questions raised by the Court’s conservative majority suggested that it believed Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s decision to be well within his discretion (WSJ).
• At oral argument, the Solicitor General alluded to the lack of evidence regarding the department’s intent, after having prevented Secretary Wilbur Ross from having to testify (Election Law Blog).
• Those posed by the liberal justices, however, characterized the citizenship question as a “solution in search of a problem,” and seemed to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Commerce Department’s purported rationale (NYT).
• The apparent unanimity of the Court’s five conservative justices may spell doom for the question’s opponents, writes Amy Howe at SCOTUSBlog.
• The Court’s treatment of Secretary Ross’s unwillingness to testify at trial, if it reaches the question at all, could implicate Congress’s ability to subpoena other administration officials, notes Ruthann Robson at Constitutional Law Professor Blog.

The White House has directed a former personnel security director to not cooperate with a subpoena from the House Oversight Committee (Lawfare).

• The Dems plan to hold him in contempt (Politico).

Trump has ordered staff not to attend White House Correspondents’ Dinner (Politico).

REGULATION

An Oregon federal judge said that he would issue a preliminary injunction in a challenge to two rules, proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services,  that would restrict Title X funds for reproductive-health providers.

• The full scope of the order isn’t yet clear, but it will likely prevent HHS from stripping federal support from physicians who refer patients to abortion providers (The Oregonian).

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST

The Treasury has missed another deadline to turn over Trump’s tax returns (CNN, Politico).

RUSSIA INVESTIGATION

Twitter today removed 5,000 accounts, possibly linked to Saudia Arabia, that called the Mueller report a hoax (The Hill).

Also today, Trump met with Twitter’s CEO (CNN).

Jared Kushner says the Russia probe was worse for America than Russian election interference (CNN).

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