Trump’s Losses Raise a Question: Should One Judge Set National Policy?
The New York Times
Trial-court judges continue to block the president’s agenda with injunctions that apply across the country. Some conservatives want to limit that power.
Judges in courtrooms from Rhode Island to Seattle have issued rulings against President Trump that have not only angered the president but also focused the attention of scholars of all ideologies on one of the judiciary’s most fearsome powers, the nationwide injunction.
Less than two months into Mr. Trump’s second term, district judges have issued nationwide decrees blocking the firings of civil servants, the freezing of congressionally appropriated federal funding, the end of nearly automatic citizenship for babies born on American soil and the relocation of transgender women in federal prisons to men’s housing. And that only names a few.
The debate over nationwide injunctions has simmered for years, but with more than 100 lawsuits pending against the Trump administration, it is now roaring. Last week, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. criticized “the unchecked power” of a district court judge who ordered the State Department to release roughly $2 billion to contractors for the U.S. Agency for International Development. Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh joined in Justice Alito’s dissent.
House Republicans are targeting nationwide injunctions with a bill that its sponsor, Representative Darrell Issa of California, said was needed to fix “a major malfunction” in the federal judiciary. Under the legislation, undocumented immigrant parents, for instance, would have to file lawsuits as individuals, or as part of a class action, to preserve citizenship rights for their children. Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, has said he is working on a similar measure that would restrict nationwide judicial orders to three-judge panels, with appeals going directly to the Supreme Court.
Democrats, in turn, have accused Republicans of going after the last check on Mr. Trump’s power, the judiciary.
Without doubt, nationwide injunctions have given the contemporary judiciary a quick and consequential cadence, since any one of the more than 600 trial court judges can make headlines with an emergency ruling that orders the White House to stop in its tracks. The growth of such rulings, experts say, has been driven by presidents of both parties who have used unilateral agency action and aggressive readings of existing laws to circumvent Congress.
