The Domestic Emoluments Clause Returns To The Trump Presidential Library in Miami

May 14, 2026 · Reason

During the first Trump Administration, the federal courts got a crash course in the Emoluments Clauses. Shortly after Trump was sworn in, progressive groups brought suit in New York, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. They argued that foreign and state governments that patronized Trump properties were giving unconstitutional emoluments to President Trump. Seth Barrett Tillman and I filed a host of amicus briefs at the District Court, Circuit Court, and Supreme Court level. However, the plaintiffs never sought a preliminary injunction or any sort of expedited relief. Indeed, despite the fact that they claimed these cases were urgent and the fate of the Republic turned on stoping this foreign influence, the plaintiffs repeatedly requested extensions and continuances. At the end of the day, the clock ran out. By the time the case made it to the Supreme Court's merits docket, Trump was out of office, and the cases ended with a whimper.

Visit catcross.org for more information.

Since Trump's second term began, I have waited with baited breath for suits based on the Emoluments Clause, as well as Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, our other scholarly interest. But nothing came. Zero. Zip. Nada. I suppose the legal resistance has bigger fish to fry with all the strategic litigation in the First Circuit.

Well, the Emoluments Clause is back. The Constitutional Accountability Center, which brought litigation during Trump 1.0, has sued President Trump for violating the Domestic Emoluments Clause. This case, however, does not concern businesses patronizing any current Trump property. Instead, the complaint alleges that the Miami-Dade Community College and the state of Florida granted Trump an unconstitutional emolument by gifting land in Downtown to be used for the Trump Presidential library. President Trump is the defendant, as well as the Trump Presidential Library, Governor DeSantis, Attorney General Uthmeier, and a host of other state officials.

In 2017, the Constitutional Accountability Center filed suit on behalf of Senator Blumenthal and other members of Congress. That theory of standing was doomed to fail. Nine years later, the Constitutional Accountability Center invoke another theory of standing that is doomed to fail.

Who are the plaintiffs in this case? There are two individuals who live near the planned location of the library in downtown Miami. They complain that the tower will block their view of Biscayne Bay, increase traffic, diminish their "quality of life," and reduce the value of their property.

Another plaintiff is Sistrunk Seeds, also known as Dunn's Farm, which wants to operate an "urban farm" in downtown Miami. Dunn claims that it had worked with Miami Dade College in the past, and wanted to build a farm across the street from Biscayne Bay, but can't because the land was given to teh library. There does not appear to be any contract or binding agreement--simply an expectation to have future discussions. The complaint admits as much: "The longstanding partnership between MDC and Dr. Dunn demonstrates that, at a minimum, MDC would have seriously considered Dunn's Farm's request for the land." The farm also claims a "diversion of resources" theory of standing.

Finally, there is a student at Miami Dade College who wants to work on the non-existent farm. The complaint states, "The emolument at issue has quashed Ms. Salcedo's opportunity to learn urban farming and nonprofit management skills on campus for academic credit." Maybe she can claim standing based on some magical beans that could grow into a beanstalk as tall as the new Trump library?

On January 22, 2017, I wrote an early blog post critical of the theory of standing in CREW v. Trump. I was met with a swift reply by Laurence Tribe. Let's see if anyone jumps on board this case.

Apart from standing, the Plaintiffs have a host of other jurisdictional hurdles. There is no cause of action. They are not within the zone of interest of the Domestic Emoluments Clause. They sued the President in his official capacity. And more. Plus the transfer of land is not an emolument. Seth and I have written on this topic.

As of yet, the plaintiffs have not sought a preliminary injunction. As they say, the process is the punishment.

These claims will not succeed, but there is a cost of losing, should this case ever make it upstairs. I can see six votes on the Supreme Court to kill diversion of resource standing, hold there is no implied cause of action for alleged violations of the Constitution, and eliminate any sort of "offended observer" standing based on seeing things that bother you. The plaintiffs here can radically set back civil rights law, all in a case that is doomed from the start. Wouldn't it be better to never bring this case in the first place? Plus, the plaintiffs filed in unfamiliar territory. They will not be protected by jurists like Peter Messitte and Emmitt Sullivan, with appeals to the friendly Fourth and D.C. Circuits. I question the wisdom of this suit.

The post The Domestic Emoluments Clause Returns To The Trump Presidential Library in Miami appeared first on Reason.com.

Read full story at source

The Coming War on Local Black Political Power

May 14, 2026 · The Atlantic

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Visit rouesnews.click for more information.

The Supreme Court’s recent Louisiana v. Callais decision, effectively demolishing a key part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, is a “five-alarm fire,” former Representative G. K. Butterfield Jr. told me this week. As southern states rush to draw new boundaries eliminating majority-minority districts, as much as a third of the Congressional Black Caucus could lose their seats. Butterfield, a former CBC chair, knows that risk well. But he also knows the less visible yet still enormous effects that Callais could have at a local level in silencing the voices of Black voters.

In 1928, George K. Butterfield Sr., a Bermuda-born dentist, moved to the eastern–North Carolina tobacco town of Wilson. Although roughly 48 percent of Wilson’s 19,000 citizens were Black, only about 40 Black people were registered to vote—but local authorities, pleased to have Butterfield in town, allowed him to register.

Less to their pleasure, Butterfield founded the local NAACP chapter, and in 1953, he decided to run for town commission. By now, Wilson had more than 500 Black registered voters, although most of them were gerrymandered into a ward with many white voters in order to dilute their power. But when the votes were counted, Butterfield and a white candidate were tied, 382–382. A blindfolded child drew a name out of a hat, and Butterfield became the first Black elected official in eastern North Carolina since Reconstruction. Two years later, he won reelection after striking a deal with a mayor to support a new recreation center in exchange for his backing, then became the council’s finance chair. (Some of the details in this account are based on the younger Butterfield's recollections.)

The city’s white power structure had seen enough. When the Butterfield family went on vacation, the council called an emergency meeting and changed the election system from wards to at-large seats—in other words, every voter in the city would now cast a vote for every seat, not just the seats in their ward. That diluted Black votes because now Butterfield had to run not against one opponent but against a whole slate. The new rules also mandated that voters had to vote for every seat that was on the ballot—meaning that Black voters couldn’t try to work as a bloc by voting only for a Black candidate or two and leaving other slots blank. It worked: Butterfield lost his 1957 reelection bid.

If Wilson’s ploy had occurred with the Voting Rights Act in full force, it would likely have been struck down under both Section 2, which bars discriminatory voting systems, and Section 5, which required some jurisdictions to “pre-clear” any changes with the U.S. Department of Justice. But the VRA was still several years away. When a Butterfield ally challenged the system in 1961, the Supreme Court of North Carolina ruled against him; the following year, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

These events made a deep impression on Butterfield’s son and namesake. “I was 10 years old, and I quickly realized that the rules can really determine the outcome of an election,” he told me. Butterfield Jr. participated in voting drives in college, attended law school, and then returned home. “I came back home with the intention to file some type of voting-rights litigation against the city, kind of to avenge what had happened to my father,” he said. Working with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, he successfully challenged at-large districts in Wilson County. That was the start of a political career that culminated in more than 18 years in the U.S. House.

Much of the reaction to Callais so far has focused on how it might affect the U.S. House and state legislative districts. This is understandable because these bodies are powerful, and the immediate effects will be more measurable. But the possibility of local and county bodies deciding not to draw new lines but to eliminate lines altogether will also have sweeping negative effects across the South.

When the Voting Rights Act was passed, Martin Luther King Jr. said he hoped the law would lead to not just Black state representatives but also Black “county commissioners, sheriffs, city councilmen, police chiefs and even mayors.” This dream has come true. One study calculated that in 1964, the year before the law passed, only 56 Black people held local elected office in the South. By 1980, 2,265 did. The results were not only symbolic: These offices control things such as schools, parks, roads, and sanitation—services that have a direct, daily effect on lives, especially those of poor people. As a new paper finds, increases in representation produced significant material improvements in the lives of Black citizens, and in many cases white ones as well. (Butterfield Jr. emphasized to me that the VRA didn’t create a right to elect Black officials; it creates an opportunity for Black voters to elect their preferred candidate, regardless of that person’s race.)

Those leaps depended on the elimination of at-large districts, which had long been common throughout the South. This was slow work, but the VRA and subsequent court rulings made it effective. Data gathered by J. Morgan Kousser, a historian at Caltech, record more than 1,000 successful challenges to at-large voting systems across the South from 1965 to 2024. The Brennan Center for Justice says challenges to at-large systems still account for most vote-dilution cases.

Now that progress could be rolled back. Although the Justice Department has vowed to bring lawsuits against districts drawn under the VRA pre-Callais, Kousser told me that he expects initial efforts to focus on federal and state elections. “I don’t think the Justice Department will get to the localities during the Trump administration,” he said. Nonetheless, he predicted that this was just a matter of time. “I think that the Justice Department is going to go after every minority Democratic officeholder.”

Some local officials may not wait for Washington. On April 22, a week before Callais, two GOP state representatives filed a bill to switch the city-council elections in Jacksonville, another city in eastern North Carolina, from a mix of wards and at-large seats to fully at-large elections. The ward system has been in place since 1990, when a lawsuit successfully challenged the at-large system as discriminatory against Black voters. Wyatt Gable, one of the representatives who introduced the bill, explained it as a way to guarantee “fairness and equal voice in local government”—an entirely Orwellian justification. (Neither Gable nor Phil Shepard, the other sponsor, replied to interview requests.)

Whether the bill will become law is unclear, but in the past, the effort to bring back at-large districts would have been very vulnerable to a legal challenge. In Callais, the Harvard Law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos argues, “the Court changed the framework for Section 2 racial vote dilution claims in ways that make these suits effectively impossible to win.” At the very least, they will be harder, because plaintiffs will have to prove intentional racial discrimination to succeed. And if Congress does not pass new legislation to defend voting rights, efforts like this could succeed across the South. The result could be a hollowing out of Black political representation and influence, not only in Washington and in state capitals but also in towns and counties—a step back toward the days when George K. Butterfield Sr. was a rare and vulnerable exception.

Related:

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

Yesterday, the Pentagon abruptly canceled the deployment of more than 4,000 troops to Poland, according to U.S. officials, accelerating President Trump’s push to reduce the U.S. military presence in Europe. The move comes two weeks after the Pentagon announced plans to withdraw 5,000 troops from Germany following criticism from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz over the White House’s handling of the Iran war.
Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing today as part of a two-day summit. Trump said Xi expressed opposition to Iran’s blocking of the Strait of Hormuz, offered help in reaching a deal with Tehran, and pledged not to provide Iran with military equipment, but said that China plans to continue buying Iranian oil.
Lawyers for Elon Musk and OpenAI’s legal team delivered closing arguments in a high-stakes trial over OpenAI’s shift from a nonprofit to a for-profit model. Musk’s legal team accused Altman, OpenAI, and its president, Greg Brockman, of betraying the company’s founding mission, and OpenAI argued that Musk’s claims are baseless and aimed at gaining control over the company.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Some literary savants have had a complicated relationship with alcohol, Luis Parrales writes. In The Atlantic’s archives, he found stories about how drinking to excess has affected the creative process.
The Weekly Planet: John Reid on how the environmental movement lost its power, and how to get it back.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Erin Simkin / HBO; Getty; HBO Max.

When Bots Write Comedy, the Joke’s on Us

By Caroline Framke

Hollywood, no stranger to existential crises, is finding itself torn on the rise of generative AI. Supporters of the technology argue that it’s the cost-saving future of show business, but opponents say that it could be the end of true creativity. As the debate over AI use rages on in the real world, the fictionalized entertainment industries of Hacks and The Comeback are similarly preoccupied. These self-aware comedies, each following women trying to leave their mark in Hollywood before their cachet expires, have satirized the business with cutting specificity. In their final seasons, the critique extends to AI’s temptations and shortcomings, ultimately making the case for the inefficient art of comedy.

Read the full article.

FSU baseball hosts Miami for rivalry series: Follow live score updates

May 14, 2026 · Yahoo Sports

Florida State baseball faces Miami in its final regular-season series of the year, with the rivalry action from Dick Howser Stadium set to begin on Thursday, May 14, in Tallahassee.

It's a series and a rivalry that has produced fireworks and plenty of classic games, with both programs' head coaches, Link Jarret and J.D. Arteaga, former players who once lined up against each other on the diamond. For Jarrett, the first game of the series will be the 43rd time he's played or coached against the Hurricanes.

Visit chickenroad-game.rodeo for more information.

FSU holds a 164-137-4 record all-time against Miami, which has not won in Tallahassee since 2016. There is a lot riding on the series for both programs, with ACC tournament seeding implications for both the No. 11 Seminoles (36-15, 17-10 ACC) and Hurricanes (35-15, 15-12 ACC).

The Seminoles can lock up a top-four seed and a double-bye in the conference tournament with a series win, and Miami could play its way into the same scenario if it beats FSU at home for the first time in a decade.

Be sure to bookmark this page and follow all the action from the weekend with the Tallahassee Democrat's live scoreboard.

FSU baseball vs. Miami live score, game updates

.oembed-frame {width:100%;height:100%;margin:0;border:0;}

Read full story at source