Supreme Court To Consider Taking Action Against Judges Blocking Trump Agenda

The Justice Department on Thursday asked the Supreme Court to rein in federal district court judges by restricting their ability to issue nationwide injunctions.

Solicitor General John Sauer asked the court to limit the scope of federal judges’ ability to issue nationwide injunctions, saying the courts have overstepped the authority given to them in Article III of the Constitution. The case stems from three universal injunctions that were placed on an executive order from President Donald Trump directing his administration not to grant birthright citizenship to children born to illegal immigrants residing in the United States.

“It is a feature, not a bug of Article III, that courts grant relief to the people who sue in front of them,” Sauer said as he took questions from the justices. “So the notion that relief has to be given to the whole world because others who have not taken the time to sue are not before the courts is something that results in all of these problems.”

Sauer said that universal injunctions lead to “rampant forum shopping,” “require judges to make rushed, high-stakes low information decisions,” and “force government to win everywhere,” while those challenging the government only need to win at one court.  

In a press call on Tuesday, a Justice Department official noted that 35 of the 39 total universal injunctions issued against the Trump administration have come from the same five courts: the districts of Massachusetts, Maryland, Washington, D.C., Northern California, and Western Washington.

Justices largely focused on procedural questions and only touched lightly on whether Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship was legal. The liberal wing of the court, including Justice Sonia Sotomayor, kept asserting that Trump’s actions to restrict birthright citizenship were unconstitutional.

Sotomayor also took issue with Sauer’s arguments that injunctions should only apply to the parties that specifically sued. She claimed that a president could hypothetically ban all guns, and each gun owner would then need to seek individual relief if the court were to take the Justice Department’s position.

On the other side, Justice Clarence Thomas, one of the most conservative members of the court, appeared very skeptical of universal injunctions in his questions.

“So we survived until the 1960s without universal injunctions?” Thomas asked Sauer. 

“That’s exactly correct,” the solicitor general replied. 

Justice Brett Kavanaugh also pushed Sauer to discuss how Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship would be carried out. Sauer replied that the administration never got the opportunity to develop its framework because it was blocked just days after the order was issued.

Trump weighed in on the case from the Middle East, posting on Truth Social that birthright citizenship was meant for slaves, and not for “people pouring into our Country from all over South America, and the rest of the World.”

“Big case today in the United States Supreme Court. Birthright Citizenship was not meant for people taking vacations to become permanent Citizens of the United States of America, and bringing their families with them, all the time laughing at the ‘SUCKERS’ that we are! The United States of America is the only Country in the World that does this, for what reason, nobody knows — But the drug cartels love it,” Trump wrote.