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WASHINGTON – A former Trump hotel located blocks from the White House that inspired a battle with congressional Democrats is at the center of a dispute that the Supreme Court on Monday agreed to resolve.
At issue is a 2017 request from a group of Democrats who demanded the Trump administration provide records about how the former president obtained the rights to develop the government-owned building into a hotel. The property became a regular haunt for foreign dignitaries and GOP officials during Trump’s presidency.
When the administration declined to provide all of those records to the House Oversight Committee, the lawmakers sued.
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The hotel itself is no longer controversial: Trump left office in 2021 and the Trump Organization sold its lease for the hotel, now a Waldorf Astoria, a year later. But there are enormous balance-of-power issues at stake for future presidents.
If the Democratic lawmakers win, it could give members of the minority in Congress more power to probe a presidential administration of the opposite party – even though they wouldn’t have the votes needed to issue a subpoena.
Trump and Biden administration officials have both fought the lawmakers’ request.
“A congressional minority – ‘or even an ideological fringe of the minority’ – could bring cases to ‘distract and harass executive agencies and their most senior officials,'” the Biden administration told the Supreme Court in November, opposing the appeal.
A federal trial court in Washington, D.C., dismissed the lawsuit in 2018, concluding that the lawmakers didn’t have standing to sue. But a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reversed that decision on a 2-1 vote in 2020.
The case is Carnahan v. Maloney.
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