Judge shuts down Trump's attempt to defund blue states

The New York Times reports a federal judge in Illinois blocked the Trump administration’s plot to snatch $600 million in public health funds from four states led by Democrats.

“Judge Manish S. Shah of the Federal District Court in Northern Illinois wrote in a two-page order that the plaintiff states — California, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota — had provided enough evidence that the cuts were ‘based on arbitrary, capricious or unconstitutional rationales’ to halt what would have been deep cuts in federal public health funding that had already been allocated while legal arguments continue in the case,” reports the Times.

Some of the $600 million in grants was intended to help specific populations, often communities of color or gay and bisexual men, which scratches against the Trump administration’s campaign against federal funding for underprivileged racial and socioeconomic groups.

This order, said the Times, is the latest ruling squashing President Donald Trump’s broader effort to impose politically motivated federal cuts to Democratic-led states. Just last week, another federal judge extended an unrelated order blocking the Trump administration from withholding $10 billion in child care and social services funding in the same four states, as well as New York — despite New York paying, on average, $20 billion more in taxes to the federal government than it gets back in federal spending.

The Times reports a court also blocked Trump’s plan to suspend funding of food stamps and other hunger relief programs in Minnesota.

Judge Shah did not specify the $600 million in grants in his decision, but applied his ruling broadly to block the Trump administration from terminating all public health grants “based on undisclosed agency priorities.”

While judges are heartily attacking Trump’s attempts to defund blue targets others are dismantling Trump’s other endeavors. On Thursday, GOP-appointed Judge Richard Leon issued a scathing ruling in Sen. Mark Kelly's (D-Ariz.) lawsuit against the Pentagon, which sought to demote him for appearing in a video reminding soldiers that they do not have to carry out unconstitutional orders.

A Manhattan federal judge, meanwhile, put an end to Trump’s attempted extortion of New York and New Jersey residents by ordering the administration to “unfreeze funding for a sprawling project paving the way for work to resume on a new set of Hudson River tunnels.”

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