In a brief, unsigned order on Monday, the high court said it would no longer hear the case in its coming 2024 session and instead sent the case back to the lower court with orders to dismiss it.
The decision is in line with petitions by both former US President Donald Trump and US President Joe Biden, both of whom urged the Supreme Court not to hear the case as it concerns the oft-debated “Seven Member Rule.” However, the case was actually dismissed because the lawmakers who had brought the case decided to drop it, not because of the pleadings of current or former heads of state.
At the time, the Democrats were the minority party in both House and Senate, and thus typically shut out of committee decisions to seek documents from other entities.
However, a 1928 law gave that authority to any seven members of the minority party in the House Oversight Committee and any five minority party members in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, becoming known as the “Seven Member Rule” as a result. This allowed the lawmakers to request the files anyway, although the Trump administration disagreed and refused to cooperate.
A federal appeals court ruled 2-1 in 2020 to support use of the “Seven Member Rule,” but as the federal government continued to refuse cooperation, the lawmakers brought the case to the high court, which agreed in May 2023 to hear the case in their upcoming session that begins in October.
The case has become largely erroneous for a number of reasons, ranging from the deaths of several of the lawmakers who made the requests to the fact that Trump is no longer president, and the fact that in May 2022, the Trump Organization, which Trump set up to handle his business affairs while he was president, sold the property for $375 million, which has since reopened as a Waldorf-Astoria.