Editors at National Review Online are happy to see the end of a misguided Trump administration idea.
Well, that didn’t take very long. Two weeks after we editorialized against the Trump administration’s $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told a House subcommittee hearing that the administration is not going forward with the fund.
That’s good news. It’s a sign that Senate Republicans in particular have remembered that they run an independent branch of the federal government, with its own responsibility to voters and its own duty to uphold the Constitution and the laws it writes. They should go two steps further: bar Trump from reviving the idea, and ensure that future presidents are no longer empowered to engage in similar mischief.
Republicans on the Hill, especially in the Senate, had concerns from the start about the fund. Its huge and transparently symbolic price tag was obviously not calibrated to any realistic assessment of the government’s actual liability for legal wrongs allegedly committed by the Biden administration. Its December 1, 2028, end date was obviously designed to ensure that it served the politics of this administration and not its successors. There were real worries that it would be used not only as a corrupt slush fund to reward political allies, but specifically to pay off January 6 rioters in ways that would be both morally wrong and politically embarrassing to Republicans.
To the extent that there’s an argument for creating new rights of compensation for government misconduct beyond those already on the books, that’s the job of Congress. The Senate and House were justifiably concerned that the fund would be an end run around their powers, and would be used by Trump and Blanche to redress what they perceive as unfairness and injustice rather than to pay for violations of established legal rights that could be proven in court.
