Audio By Carbonatix

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.

It is also heartening to see that the power of the purse still works. The direct impetus for Blanche’s concession was that he and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin were both testifying hat in hand as Congress considers another bill to fund immigration enforcement. That gave leverage to the legislative branch that it seems at times to forget that it has.

The fund was publicly indefensible, and election years have a way of putting a stop to indefensible things. The closest thing to a defense of the fund is that prior Democratic administrations have also used collusive settlements to pay off political allies who did not suffer specific legal wrongs that could have been proven in court. But that’s just another way of saying that what is wrong today was wrong before Trump got to town.

Republicans should use the uproar over the Trump fund as an opportunity and a teaching moment, and pressure Democrats to agree to more restrictions on the self-licking ice cream cone that is the permanent Judgment Fund. Critics have long argued that the fund, which pays out claims without consequence to the budgets of offending agencies and which abdicated congressional oversight over executive spending on settlements, is ripe for abuse and offends the proper separation of powers. This would be an excellent time to fix that.