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Senate rejects competing bills, increasing risk of shutdown on Oct. 1
Legal World News |
2025/09/17 09:48
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The Senate rejected competing measures on Friday to fund federal agencies for a few weeks when the new budget year begins on Oct. 1, increasing prospects for a partial government shutdown on that date.
Leaders of the two parties sought to blame the other side for the standoff. Democrats accused Republicans of not negotiating with them to address some of their priorities on health care as part of the funding measure, even though they knew Democratic votes would be needed to get a bill to the president’s desk.
Republicans said Democrats were making demands that would dramatically increase spending and were not germane to the core issue of keeping agencies fully running for a short period of time while negotiations continued on a full-year spending package.
It’s unclear how the two sides will be able to avoid a shutdown. Republicans are planning on what amounts to a do-over vote on their proposal close to the deadline in the hopes that more Democrats will have second thoughts. Democrats are repeating their demand that Republicans sit down with them and work on a compromise.
“The theater must end,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said after the vote. “Let’s sit down and negotiate.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., gave no indication of a change in course.
“All it takes is a handful of Democrats to join the Republicans in keeping the government open and funded, and to ensure we have a chance to get the appropriations process completed in the way it was intended,” Thune said.
The Senate action came after the House earlier in the day passed the Republican-led funding bill. The measure would extend government funding generally at current levels for seven weeks. The bill would also add about $88 million in security funding for lawmakers and members of the Supreme Court and executive branch in the wake of the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
The vote was 217-212. Rep. Jared Golden of Maine was the lone Democratic member to support the bill. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Wash., also said she tried to vote for the bill but was not recognized by the presiding officer. She was listed officially as not voting.
House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana said he knew he had few votes to spare as he sought to persuade fellow Republicans to vote for the funding patch, something many in his conference have routinely opposed in past budget fights. But this time, GOP members saw a chance to portray the Democrats as responsible for a shutdown.
“The ball is in Chuck Schumer’s court. I hope he does the right thing. I hope he does not choose to shut the government down and inflict pain on the American people,” Johnson said.
President Donald Trump had urged House Republicans to pass the bill and put the burden on Democrats to oppose it. GOP leaders often need Trump’s help to win over holdouts on legislation.
Trump predicted Friday that there could be “a closed country for a period of time.” He said the government will continue to “take care” of the military and Social Security payments in a closure.
Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said that in opposing the continuing resolution, Democrats were working to protect the health care of the American people. He said that with Republicans controlling the White House and both branches of Congress, “Republicans will own a government shutdown. Period. Full stop.”
The Senate moved quickly after the House vote to take up the measure plus the Democratic counter. Both bills fell far short of the 60 votes required for passage.
The Democratic proposal would extend enhanced health insurance subsidies set to expire at the end of the year, plus reverse Medicaid cuts that were included in Republicans’ big tax breaks and spending cuts bill enacted earlier this year.
The Democratic measure actually received more votes than the Republican one due to absences. The 47-45 vote went strictly along party lines.
“The American people will look at what Republicans are doing, look at what Democrats are doing, and it will be clear that public sentiment will be on our side,” Schumer said.
The Republican measure gained 44 votes, including from Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania. But 48 voted against it, including two Republicans, Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. |
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Military lawyers will serve as immigration judges as courts face massive backlog
Legal Information |
2025/09/12 10:34
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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has approved sending up to 600 military lawyers to the Justice Department to serve as temporary immigration judges, according to a memo reviewed by The Associated Press.
The military will begin sending groups of 150 attorneys — both military and civilians — to the Justice Department “as soon as practicable,” and the military services should have the first round of people identified by next week, according to the Aug. 27 memo.
The effort comes as the Trump administration more regularly turns to the military as it cracks down on illegal immigration through ramped-up arrests and deportations. Its growing role in the push includes troops patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border, National Guard members being sent into U.S. cities to support immigration enforcement efforts, housing people awaiting deportation on military bases and using military aircraft to carry out deportations.
The administration’s focus on illegal immigration has added strain to the immigration courts, which were already dealing with a massive backlog of roughly 3.5 million cases that has ballooned in recent years. An organization for immigration lawyers called the new directive a “destructive” move meant to undermine the courts.
At the same time, more than 100 immigration judges have been fired or left voluntarily after taking deferred resignations offered by the Trump administration, their union says. In the most recent round of terminations, the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers said in July that at least 17 immigration judges had been fired “without cause” in courts across the country.
That has left about 600 immigration judges, union figures show, meaning the Pentagon move would double their ranks.
The Justice Department, which oversees the immigration courts, requested the assistance from the Defense Department, according to the memo sent by the Pentagon’s executive secretary to his DOJ counterpart. The military lawyers’ duties as immigration judges will initially last no more than 179 days but can be renewed, it said.
A DOJ spokesperson referred questions about the plan to the Defense Department, where officials directed questions to the White House.
A White House official said Tuesday that the administration is looking at a variety of options to help resolve the significant backlog of immigration cases, including hiring additional immigration judges. The official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, said the matter should be “a priority that everyone — including those waiting for adjudication — can rally around.”
The head of the American Immigration Lawyers Association decried bringing in temporary judges who lack expertise in immigration law, saying “it makes as much as sense as having a cardiologist do a hip replacement.”
“Expecting fair decisions from judges unfamiliar with the law is absurd. This reckless move guts due process and further undermines the integrity of our immigration court system,” said Ben Johnson, the organization’s executive director.
The memo stressed that the additional attorneys are contingent on availability and that mobilizing reserve officers may be necessary. Plus, the document said DOJ would be responsible for ensuring that anyone sent from the Pentagon does not violate the federal prohibition on using the military as domestic law enforcement, known as the Posse Comitatus Act.
The administration faced a setback on its efforts to use troops in unique ways to combat illegal immigration and crime, with a court ruling Tuesday that it “willfully” violated federal law by sending National Guard troops to Los Angeles in early June.
It is not immediately clear what impact shifting that number of military attorneys would have on the armed forces’ justice system. The attorneys, called judge advocates, have a range of duties much like civilian lawyers, from carrying out prosecutions, acting as a defense attorney or offering legal advice.
Pentagon officials did immediately offer details on where any of the 600 attorneys will be drawn from and whether they will come from active duty or the reserves.
Until she was abruptly fired in July, former supervising judge Jennifer Peyton administered the intensive training that all judges in Chicago undergo before working in some of the busiest immigration courts in the country. After the weekslong training, new judges are paired with an experienced mentor and have a two-year probationary period.
Peyton doubted that military attorneys would be able to master the complexities of immigration law without that rigorous process. She also said it wasn’t clear how they would handle the hundreds, or sometimes thousands, of cases on just a Chicago immigration judge’s docket each year.
“Six months is barely enough time to start to figure out the firehose of information and training,” she said.
Peyton also was concerned that Trump’s move didn’t supply more administrative workers, including translators, whom judges rely on to make decisions. The stakes, she said, were life or death for people who would come before the new judges.
“None of it makes sense unless you were intentionally trying to weaken the immigration courts,” Peyton said.
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Anthropic to pay authors $1.5 billion to settle lawsuit over pirated books
Legal Information |
2025/09/08 10:34
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Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit by book authors who say the company took pirated copies of their works to train its chatbot.
The landmark settlement, if approved by a judge as soon as Monday, could mark a turning point in legal battles between AI companies and the writers, visual artists and other creative professionals who accuse them of copyright infringement.
The company has agreed to pay authors or publishers about $3,000 for each of an estimated 500,000 books covered by the settlement.
“As best as we can tell, it’s the largest copyright recovery ever,” said Justin Nelson, a lawyer for the authors. “It is the first of its kind in the AI era.”
A trio of authors — thriller novelist Andrea Bartz and nonfiction writers Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson — sued last year and now represent a broader group of writers and publishers whose books Anthropic downloaded to train its chatbot Claude.
A federal judge dealt the case a mixed ruling in June, finding that training AI chatbots on copyrighted books wasn’t illegal but that Anthropic wrongfully acquired millions of books through pirate websites.
If Anthropic had not settled, experts say losing the case after a scheduled December trial could have cost the San Francisco-based company even more money.
“We were looking at a strong possibility of multiple billions of dollars, enough to potentially cripple or even put Anthropic out of business,” said Thomas Long, a legal analyst for Wolters Kluwer.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco has scheduled a Monday hearing to review the settlement terms.
Anthropic said in a statement Friday that the settlement, if approved, “will resolve the plaintiffs’ remaining legacy claims.”
“We remain committed to developing safe AI systems that help people and organizations extend their capabilities, advance scientific discovery, and solve complex problems,” said Aparna Sridhar, the company’s deputy general counsel.
As part of the settlement, the company has also agreed to destroy the original book files it downloaded.
Books are known to be important sources of data — in essence, billions of words carefully strung together — that are needed to build the AI large language models behind chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude and its chief rival, OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Alsup’s June ruling found that Anthropic had downloaded more than 7 million digitized books that it “knew had been pirated.” It started with nearly 200,000 from an online library called Books3, assembled by AI researchers outside of OpenAI to match the vast collections on which ChatGPT was trained.
Debut thriller novel “The Lost Night” by Bartz, a lead plaintiff in the case, was among those found in the dataset. Anthropic later took at least 5 million copies from the pirate website Library Genesis, or LibGen, and at least 2 million copies from the Pirate Library Mirror, Alsup wrote.
The Authors Guild told its thousands of members last month that it expected “damages will be minimally $750 per work and could be much higher” if Anthropic was found at trial to have willfully infringed their copyrights. The settlement’s higher award — approximately $3,000 per work — likely reflects a smaller pool of affected books, after taking out duplicates and those without copyright.
On Friday, Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, called the settlement “an excellent result for authors, publishers, and rightsholders generally, sending a strong message to the AI industry that there are serious consequences when they pirate authors’ works to train their AI, robbing those least able to afford it.”
The Danish Rights Alliance, which successfully fought to take down one of those shadow libraries, said Friday that the settlement would be of little help to European writers and publishers whose works aren’t registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.
“On the one hand, it’s comforting to see that compiling AI training datasets by downloading millions of books from known illegal file-sharing sites comes at a price,” said Thomas Heldrup, the group’s head of content protection and enforcement. |
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Trump asks Supreme Court to quickly take up tariffs case and reverse ruling
Legal Information |
2025/09/04 13:56
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The Trump administration took the fight over tariffs to the Supreme Court on Wednesday, asking the justices to rule quickly that the president has the power to impose sweeping import taxes under federal law.
The government called on the court to reverse an appeals court ruling that found most of President Donald Trump’s tariffs are an illegal use of an emergency powers law.
It’s the latest in a series of Trump administration appeals to a Supreme Court he helped shape, and one that is expected to put a centerpiece of the president’s trade policy before the justices.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit left the tariffs in place for now, but the administration nevertheless called on the high court to intervene quickly in a petition filed electronically late Wednesday and provided to The Associated Press. It was expected to be formally docketed on Thursday.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the justices to take up the case and hear arguments in early November.
“That decision casts a pall of uncertainty upon ongoing foreign negotiations that the President has been pursuing through tariffs over the past five months, jeopardizing both already negotiated framework deals and ongoing negotiations,” he wrote. “The stakes in this case could not be higher.”
But the stakes are also high for small businesses battered by tariffs and uncertainty, said Jeffrey Schwab, senior counsel and director of litigation at the Liberty Justice Center.
“These unlawful tariffs are inflicting serious harm on small businesses and jeopardizing their survival. We hope for a prompt resolution of this case for our clients,” he said.
The businesses have twice prevailed, once at a federal court focused on trade and again with the appeals court’s 7-4 ruling.
Their lawsuit is one of several challenging the tariffs and erratic rollout that have shaken global markets, alienated U.S. trading partners and allies and raised fears of higher prices and slower economic growth.
But Trump has also used the levies to pressure the European Union, Japan and other countries into accepting new trade deals. Revenue from tariffs totaled $159 billion by late August, more than double what it was at the same point the year before.
Most judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit found the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, did not let Trump usurp congressional power to set tariffs. The dissenters, though, said the law does allow the president to regulate importation during emergencies without explicit limitations.
The ruling involves two sets of import taxes, both of which Trump justified by declaring a national emergency: the tariffs first announced in April and the ones from February on imports from Canada, China and Mexico.
The Constitution gives Congress the power to impose taxes, including tariffs. But over the decades, lawmakers have ceded authority to the president, and Trump has made the most of the power vacuum.
Some Trump tariffs, including levies on foreign steel, aluminum and autos, weren’t covered by the appeals court ruling. It also does not include tariffs Trump imposed on China in his first term that were kept by Democratic President Joe Biden.
Trump can impose tariffs under other laws, but those have more limitations on the speed and severity with which he could act.
The government has argued that if the tariffs are struck down, it might have to refund some of the import taxes that it’s collected, delivering a financial blow to the U.S. Treasury. |
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