Trump weighs US vaccine appeal, US Congress to pass bills to fully fund Homeland Security and more ➡️

☀️ Good morning from The Legal File! Here is the rundown of today’s top legal news:

Supporters of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are pressing for a fight for the U.S. vaccine overhaul their “Make America Healthy Again” movement helped create.

But two weeks after a court ruling halted key aspects of the vaccine revamp, the Trump administration has not taken any steps to appeal, a delay longer than for other cases where President Donald Trump has aggressively fought federal rulings challenging his agenda.

To move quickly on an appeal, the DOJ could have preemptively asked Boston-based U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy to put the ruling on hold, a tactic it has used in other cases. It could also have asked Murphy to reconsider his order or move to appeal the decision to the 1st Circuit, a precursor to pursuing any further appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. It can still appeal under a 60-day window.

George Washington University law professor Sara Rosenbaum, a former vaccine committee member who filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of the plaintiffs, said the lack of action was noteworthy. In other cases, the administration has been “kapow, turning around and filing your appeal before the ink was dry,” she said.

The administration must balance the support of millions of Kennedy’s MAHA backers, who were already upset by Trump’s order to boost pesticide production, against low general public support for his vaccine agenda. MAHA is seen as an important constituency whose votes were key to Trump’s win in the 2024 election.

President Donald Trump took the short trip from the White House to the U.S. Supreme Court with his signature priority of cracking down on immigration largely intact, given repeated interventions by the nation’s highest judicial body in his favor. By the time he left, his luck may have run out.

With Trump looking on from the public section of the courtroom — a historic first for a sitting president — most of the nine justices seemed unwilling on Wednesday to let him proceed with what may be the most audacious piece of his restrictive immigration agenda. At issue during the arguments was his executive order that would deny birthright citizenship to hundreds of thousands of babies born each year on U.S. soil.

The members of the court, led for more than two decades by conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, signaled that the administration’s arguments backing Trump’s effort are legally invalid and inherently impractical.

“I do not think that Chief Justice Roberts wants to go down in history as presiding over a court that ended birthright citizenship,” said Kevin Johnson, an immigration law expert at the University of California, Davis.

The court, whose 6-3 conservative majority includes three justices appointed by Trump, heard the administration’s appeal of a lower court’s decision that blocked his directive.

Republican leaders in the U.S. Congress on April 1 said they will take a two-pronged approach to ending the legislative deadlock over Department of Homeland Security funding by passing a bill soon to end the partial agency shutdown and attempting to follow up with another bill providing money for the remainder of the Trump administration.

Congress “will fully reopen the Department, make sure all federal workers are paid, and specifically fund immigration enforcement and border security for the next three years,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune and House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson said in a joint statement.

Congress is in the midst of a two-week recess.

But the next legislative action is expected to come today, when the Republican-controlled Senate is scheduled to hold a “pro forma” session that usually operates for a very short period of time and with few senators in the chamber.

The goal, according to a source with knowledge of the plan, is to again approve a DHS funding bill that the Senate unanimously passed last week, but the Republican-controlled House rejected. That bill would fund DHS to September 30, the end of this fiscal year.

Instead of signing off on the bipartisan Senate bill, the House passed a 60-day extension of DHS funding — a measure that Democrats had repeatedly rejected.

Those dueling bills underscored the deep divisions among conservatives in both chambers, in addition to significant disagreements between Republicans and Democrats.

A New York state judge on April 1 delayed Luigi Mangione’s trial on charges of murdering a health insurance executive to September 8, throwing into question the timing of a parallel federal trial.

In a brief written order, Justice Gregory Carro in Manhattan pushed Mangione’s trial start date back from June 8. Carro did not specify a reason, but the judge had expressed frustration during a February 6 hearing that federal prosecutors had “reneged” on a promise to let state prosecutors go to trial first.

Hours earlier, U.S. District Judge Margaret Garnett, who is overseeing Mangione’s federal trial on stalking charges stemming from the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, pushed back by a few weeks the start of that trial to October 13.

Mangione’s state court trial is expected to last six weeks, defense lawyer Karen Friedman-Agnifilo said at a hearing before Garnett on April 1.

Mangione has pleaded not guilty to all charges. At the February hearing, while being led out of the courtroom in prison garb and shackles, Mangione said it was unfair that he was being exposed to two trials over the same alleged offense.

Mangione has been jailed since his arrest in Pennsylvania five days after the shooting death of Thompson, who led UnitedHealth Group’s health insurance business, outside a hotel in midtown Manhattan.

That’s all for today, thank you for reading The Legal File, and have a great weekend!

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