President Trump is now being sued for violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution, Reuters reports:
A group including former White House ethics attorneys will file a lawsuit on Monday accusing President Donald Trump of allowing his businesses to accept payments from foreign governments, in violation of the U.S. Constitution.
Deepak Gupta, a Supreme Court litigator working on the case, said the lawsuit would allege that the Constitution’s emoluments clause forbids payments to Trump’s businesses. It will seek a court order forbidding Trump from accepting such payments, he said.
The case has been brought by a left-wing group, but one of the plaintiffs in the case will be a Bush administration ethics lawyer. It aims to get a judge to order Trump to stop taking payments from foreign governments.
For those not familiar with the emoluments clause (or as Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., recently referred to it in a hearing, the “annulments clause“) it is this phrase from Article I, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution:
No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.
According to the Heritage Foundation’s guide to the Constitution, the clause was intended to countermand certain foreign monarchs’ practice of giving lavish gifts to diplomats with whom they signed treaties. Under the right circumstances, such gifts could have become an inducement for diplomats to accept something less than ideal to American interests.
Obviously, the same concerns exist with a president who has significant business dealings with representatives of foreign states, and that goes double for Trump, whose ties to Vladimir Putin have become such an issue.
Eric Trump has said the Trump Organization will donate profits from foreign governments incurred at Trump hotels to the U.S. Treasury, but depending on the precise details, that doesn’t necessarily clear up the entire issue. After all, the word “profits” (although that’s the Times’ word, not Trump’s) hints that the company could potentially keep revenues from foreign governments that don’t represent actual profits. Technically, that might still represent a benefit to a hotel company compared to leaving its rooms completely empty.
But there just isn’t much about this clause of the Constitution in the way of court precedent, according to research published last month by BNA. And some scholars even have doubts about whether it was even intended to apply to the president or to any elected officials, or just to appointees, given George Washington’s example of publicly accepting and keeping gifts without asking Congress for permission.
One interesting fact: This issue last came up in 2009 when President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. The Department of Justice issued an opinion that his acceptance would not fall afoul of the clause “because the Nobel Committee that awards the Peace Prize is not a ‘King, Prince, or foreign State,'” and so Obama didn’t have to ask Congress’s permission to accept.
