Can anything be done about the serious corruption risks posed by Donald Trump’s dual role as President of the United States and patriarch of a vast business empire? Do any of these apparent conflicts of interest break the law? If so, is it reasonable to hope that the courts will step in?

As readers of this blog are likely aware, a group of activists, lawyers, and legal scholars have asserted that the answers to the above questions are Yes, Yes, and Yes. The fact that President Trump’s companies do business with foreign governments, the argument goes, means that the President is in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause, which prohibits any person “holding any office of profit or trust under [the United States]” from accepting, without congressional consent, “any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.” Shortly after the inauguration, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a nonprofit advocacy group, filed a lawsuit seeking a declaration that President Trump was in violation of the Foreign Emoluments Clause and a court order enjoining the President from further violations of that clause.

Before CREW filed its suit, I was skeptical about the prospects of a judicial remedy for this alleged Emoluments Clause violation—not because I didn’t think that President Trump was in violation of the clause (quite the opposite), but because I didn’t think it was realistic to expect that a court would be willing to order the sitting President to rearrange his financial affairs (or hold him in contempt if he didn’t). My prediction was that the court would find a way to dismiss the suit on jurisdictional grounds, or deem it a non-justiciable “political question.” And my skepticism only deepened after CREW filed its original complaint. Like many other legal analysts, I thought that CREW’s claimed basis for “standing” (which requires a direct, concrete, non-ideological injury to the plaintiff) was flimsy and would likely be rejected, and I worried that the whole enterprise would prove counterproductive, because a dismissal on jurisdictional grounds would be widely misinterpreted as a judicial rejection of the substantive claim that Donald Trump is violating the Constitution.

Two days ago, CREW filed an amended complaint, which has caused me to rethink (though not entirely abandon) my earlier skepticism. The new complaint includes a number of changes, but by far the two most important are these:

1. The amended complaint adds two new plaintiffs to the suit—an association of restaurants and a Washington, D.C. event planner—whose claims to have standing are much stronger than CREW’s.
2. The amended complaint also adds new substantive allegations that President Trump is not only violating the Foreign Emoluments Clause, but is also violating a separate provision of the Constitution, the so-called “Domestic Emoluments Clause,” which states that the President shall receive a fixed salary, which cannot be changed during his term, and that the President “shall not receive within that period any other emolument from the United States, or any [state].”

In a future post I may have something to say about the Domestic Emoluments Clause issue, but for now I want to focus on how much difference the addition of the two new plaintiffs makes to the likelihood that the lawsuit will survive a motion to dismiss on jurisdictional grounds. My initial take is that it makes a big difference—the case for standing, under current doctrine, is now much stronger than it was before—but some problems still remain. Continue reading →