26 June 2023
The Supreme Court will no longer hear a case on whether Democratic lawmakers should have been able to sue to obtain documents related to former President Trump’s then-owned Washington, D.C., hotel after congressional members dismissed the lawsuit.
After the high court last month agreed to hear the Biden Justice Department’s appeal in the case, Democrats dismissed the dispute in a lower court. Both sides then wrote to the justices agreeing that the Supreme Court should toss it as moot.
The justices in a brief, unsigned order on Monday vacated the lower ruling and sent it back with instructions to dismiss the case. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the order, saying she would’ve instead used a different procedural mechanism to toss the case.
The hotel documents had largely fallen out of the dispute, as the lawmakers obtained most of them through other means.
But the case was set to weigh how the minority party in Congress can scrutinize a presidential administration using a federal law known as the “Seven Member Rule.”
The Justice Department had asked the justices to declare that the Democrats could not sue in court to enforce the rule, which allows any seven members of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability or any five members of the Senate Homeland Security Committee to ask for information within their purview from executive agencies.
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