A federal judge has dismissed a class action lawsuit filed in December against North Coast Congressmember Jared Huffman alleging he broke the law when he voted in favor of providing military aid to Israel.
About a month after the case was filed, Vince Chhabria, a judge in the U.S. District Court for Northern California, ordered the plaintiffs — a group of more than 500 taxpayers from nine counties, including Humboldt — to explain why they had an actionable case or standing to bring it, saying, “At first glance, this lawsuit appears to be a frivolous attempt to get the court involved in a pure foreign policy issue.”
He ordered the plaintiffs’ attorneys to file a response of not more than 15 pages.
“The plaintiffs should use the space to explain how they have standing, to describe what sort of relief they could be entitled to and articulate why it would be appropriate for a federal court to get involved in foreign policy questions relating to the United States’ role in the Middle East,” the judge’s order states, noting that attorneys representing Huffman and fellow Representative Mike Thompson, who was also named as a defendant in the suit, “need not make an appearance or file any sort of response.”
After considering the requested argument, Chhabria dismissed the suit without leave to amend, finding the plaintiffs did not have standing — or did not show they’d personally been harmed by Huffman and Thompson’s actions — and that even if they did, “the case nonetheless presents a nonjusticiable political question.”
The plaintiffs had argued in the case that they suffered personal pain and suffering stemming from Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and resulting humanitarian crisis, which they equated to an attempted genocide of the Palestinian people. After Hamas militants invaded Israel and killed more than 1,200 people in a surprise attack Oct. 7, 2023, Israel — with U.S. support in the form of military equipment — launched a brutal counterattack that has left between 40,000 and 186,000 people dead, most of them civilians, according to international estimates. A ceasefire that has endured for weeks in the conflict is set to expire this weekend.
The lawsuit alleged Huffman’s 2024 vote to provide military aid to Israel, paid for by U.S. taxpayers, effectively funded genocide in violation of international and U.S. law.
But legal and government experts interviewed by the Journal after the lawsuit was filed in December said it didn’t have a chance of success, pointing to constitutional protections for lawmakers and longstanding case law dictating that someone’s status as a taxpayer alone does not give them standing to legally challenge government spending decisions.
David Levine, a professor at University of California College of Law, San Francisco, called the lawsuit “D.O.A.,” saying the Speech and Debate Clause of the U.S. Constitution is intended to shield members of Congress from liability for acts taken within the legislative sphere. He also pointed to a long history of taxpayers bringing lawsuit to challenge spending decisions only to have them thrown out of court because the plaintiffs couldn’t show they’d personally been harmed.
“Basically,” Levine wrote in an email to the Journal, the remedy is, if you don’t like what your representatives are doing, vote them out of office the next time they stand for re-election.”
Plaintiffs in the case, self-dubbed Taxpayers Against Genocide, recently held a news conference in San Francisco, calling out “the failure of the Northern California Federal Court to deal with U.S. complicity in genocide,” and announcing plans to file a report with the United Nations Human Rights Council in April and “explore other international legal remedies.”
“This is an absolute betrayal of every single taxpayer on every level, be it city, state or federal,” said Nida Liftawiya, in a press release from the group. “This is just the beginning. We will continue to push for answers, and we will not rest until justice is served. Our communities deserve better.”
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