Judges may be days away from jailing people in showdown with Trump administration: analyst

One political analyst thinks judges are close to jailing people for contempt in the ongoing court battles over government funding cuts.

U.S. District Court Judge Amir H. Ali ruled on Wednesday that he would not pause his order giving President Donald Trump's administration an 11:59 p.m. deadline that same day to pay invoices for foreign development funds for contracts completed before Feb. 13, Just Security and MSNBC legal analyst Adam Klasfeld said on Bluesky.

Policy Professor Don Moynihan, at the Ford School, University of Michigan, commented that thus far, the "Trump administration broke the law by pausing legitimate spending. The courts told him to knock it off. They didn't. [The] court is telling them to knock it off again. [The] next step is to find out whether we still have an administration that will obey the courts after the courts call them on their bulls---."

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Conservative Andy Craig, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, flagged this comment and noted that courts are quickly losing their patience and moving through the cases.

"I get the do-it-right-now impulse for insisting judges start throwing people in jail for contempt, but I think there's some misunderstanding of how that escalation ladder works in practice and how extraordinarily rapidly judges are already moving up it," said the election law and electoral reform expert on Bluesky. "We are at most weeks, possibly days away."