9th U.S. Circuit Court judges, in a split decision, have blocked the Trump administration's effort to use Defense Department funding to build a border wall through Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument/Patrick Cone file

A split 9th U.S. Circuit Court Of Appeals has denied the Trump administration's efforts to tap military funding for a wall along the country's southern border, with the majority saying the administration's efforts were an unconstitutional appropriation of Congressional authority.

The ruling, for now, blocks a 30-foot wall with "all-night floodlighting" from being installed along the southern border of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona with Mexico.

The case revolved around U.S. Customs and Border Protection plans to build a tall barrier wall along the monument's 63-mile-long boundary with Mexico. Late last month a federal judge in California blocked the plan to build a wall with concrete-filled steel bollards that are approximately 6 inches in diameter. U.S. District Judge Haywood S. Gilliam, Jr., acting on a lawsuit brought by the Sierra Club and the Southern Border Communities Coalition, held that it was illegal for the Trump administration to use $2.5 billion in funds appropriated to the military to pay for the border wall.

The administration asked the 9th Circuit to stay that ruling until it could be further litigated, but the appellate court's majority rejected that request.

"There is a strong likelihood that Plaintiffs will prevail in this litigation, and Defendants have a correspondingly low likelihood of success on appeal," wrote the majority opinion signed by Judges Richard Clifton and Michelle Friedland. "As for the public interest, we conclude that it is best served by respecting the Constitution’s assignment of the power of the purse to Congress, and by deferring to Congress’s understanding of the public interest as reflected in its repeated denial of more funding for border barrier construction."

But in his dissent, Judge N.R. Smith said the lower court hadn't fully ruled on the Constitutional question of the Executive Branch's authority, only that it ruled on whether the administration had violated a statute, and so his two colleagues had wrongly turned the case into a Constitutional matter. Further, Judge Smith maintained that since Congress had given the Defense Department a "lump sum" appropriation, it gave the department discretion in deciding how those funds are spent.

"The majority’s approach would turn our current system of administrative review on its head, directing courts in this circuit to deem unconstitutional any reviewable executive actions that exceed a statutory grant of authority," wrote the judge. "Such an approach directly contradicts the Supreme Court’s declaration that '[o]ur cases do not support the proposition that every action by the President, or by another executive official, in excess of his statutory authority is ipso facto in violation of the Constitution.'"

Administration attorneys had argued before the 9th Circuit that if the money transfer wasn't enabled by the end of the current fiscal year, September 30, it would no longer be available.

Sierra Club staff were greatly concerned how the proposed wall and its construction would impact Organ Pipe Cactus.

"The entire southern boundary of Organ Pipe would be walled off by what has been described as a 30-foot wall with all-night floodlighting," Dan Mills, of the Sierra Club's Grand Canyon Chapter Borderlands Program, told the Traveler last week. "The contractor is already there on the ground, doing surveys and planning work. They’re talking about drilling new wells to do onsite concrete mixing for the foundation and for filling the steel posts. So it would be an enormous change."