Two senators — one Republican and one Democrat — have filed court papers urging a federal judge to maintain her block on the Trump administration’s $1.8 billion fund to pay people claiming to have been unfairly prosecuted, arguing that its creation last month amounted to an illegal “end-run” around Congress.
The move by the two senators — Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, and Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey — was the latest bipartisan effort to stop the fund, which is also facing legislative headwinds on the Senate floor amid accusations that it would be a slush fund for President Trump’s allies. It was another indication that even some Republican lawmakers appeared not to trust assurances by Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, that the fund was dead.
On Tuesday, Mr. Blanche told a House subcommittee that the Justice Department was withdrawing the proposal. But one day later, Mr. Trump appeared to backtrack, saying that he still loved the idea of using taxpayer money to pay people who claimed to have been politically persecuted.
The court papers filed by Mr. Cassidy and Mr. Booker, known as an amicus brief, were submitted on Wednesday evening to Judge Leonie M. Brinkema, who temporarily blocked the fund last week so that she could consider the legal issues surrounding it more deeply. Judge Brinkema has scheduled a June 12 hearing to discuss those issues in Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The judge’s decision to put the fund on hold came in response to a lawsuit filed by Andrew Floyd, a former federal prosecutor who was fired by the Justice Department after working on scores of cases arising from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Mr. Floyd and two other plaintiffs who claimed to have suffered harms from the Trump administration argued that the fund had been unfairly set up to benefit only purported victims of Democratic administrations.
In their brief, the senators called the fund “an immediate and dire threat to our constitutional order and the authority of Congress,” and urged Judge Brinkema to rule in favor of Mr. Floyd and the other plaintiffs: Jonathan Caravello, a professor at California State University Channel Islands who was arrested while protesting an immigration raid, and the city of New Haven, Conn., which claims it was punished for being a sanctuary city for immigrants.
“The anti-weaponization fund constitutes an improper and unconstitutional transfer of taxpayer dollars, including to those who engaged in a violent insurrection against the United States and its democratically elected representatives — including the United States Senate — on Jan. 6, 2021,” the senators wrote. “And it entirely bypasses Congress’s crucial role under the Appointments Clause in determining who may wield authority as an officer of the United States.”
Lawyers for Mr. Floyd and the others praised the filing.
“The significance of this bipartisan engagement cannot be overstated,” said Skye Perryman, the president of Democracy Forward, a nonprofit group that filed the original lawsuit. “As this administration is attempting to evade accountability and create one of the most brazen power grabs of taxpayer funds in modern history, we applaud these two senators — a Democrat and a Republican — for speaking with one voice: The Constitution still matters.”
