US Supreme Court limits federal judges' power to block Trump orders
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Strategically, the government could enact a policy affecting a million people, be sued, lose, provide relief to the named plaintiffs, and then not appeal the decision. The upper courts never get the opportunity to make binding precedent, the lower courts do not get to extend relief to non-plaintiffs, and the government gets to enforce its illegal policies on the vast majority of people who did not (likely could not) sue.
That said, the procedure here is to just use class action lawsuits to get nationwide injunctions. The opinion explicitly notes that it is an option. And today there was a big flurry of people amending their complaints to do just that.
Unfortunately "the set of people who are affected by this law" doesn't define a class.
Can you explain this statement in greater detail?
Lets not forget the ACLU has burnt 100 years of goodwill to become the bad guys in the past decade.
They went from from amazing freedom fighters to lets hope their organization gets destroyed because of the awful humans they let in internally in recent times. I understand there is a split with an old guard still fighting to get it back, but they will lose.
> "the cruelty is the point" read that EO
Helps if you link it - https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/defe...
I recently learned my company’s Handbook has a passage which says I cannot participate in a class action lawsuit against the company. Sure, they can _just say_ I can’t eat green M&Ms, but what’s the twist?
But yeah, ever since the Supreme Court blessed those provisions in National Labor Relations Board v. Murphy Oil USA, Inc (2018), companies have been adding them to employee agreements.
That's why the Feds were moving high-profile detainees to Louisiana as quickly as possible; for a more friendly judicial setup.
https://www.axios.com/2025/03/27/trump-immigration-louisiana...
This is all a joke anyway. There’s no real rule of law. This is a game to extract more power.
So here's how the loophole works. There are 12 courts of appeals. You (ICE) does a bad thing. (renditions a US citizen to an El Salvador concentration camp without due process) You get sued, appeal it to that court of appeals. Let's say it's the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, let's say you lose. You take the L and move on. You never do the bad thing in the 9th circuit again: that decision is binding. Then you do it again in a different circuit. Let's say you do the bad thing in Texas, where the 9th circuit decision was not binding. Let's say you win this time. Now the 5th circuit is your playground.
From now on, every time you arrest someone in the 9th circuit, you put them on an express flight to anywhere in the 5th district within an hour or so of arresting them, before they can get a lawyer to talk to a judge. The precedent that matters is the 5th circuit precedent, where the detainee is right now, not the 9th district (or anywhere else) where they were detained.
Because the Supreme Court has now ruled that this is a lower court problem, they've effectively blocked anyone from ever getting justice ever again.
That is one of the main roles of the Supreme Court: resolving circuit splits.
The 9th has nothing to do with an immigration hearing in the 5th, the individual’s personal history is irrelevant here.
Matter of Rahman, 20 I&N Dec. 480 (BIA 1992) seems to cover this. (IANAL)
This is not guaranteed.
They don't have to take up a circuit split. They could just… leave it. Several are unresolved as we speak; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_split#Examples_of_exis...
Which leaves the Fifth Circuit a permanent loophole.
No, district court decisions are not binding precedent, not even in the district.
"Precedent" can include both binding authority and persuasive authority. Any ruling (and lots of things which aren't rulings, like scholarly treatises), can be persuasive precedent, but trial court decisions are not binding precedent, even in the district of the court that issued them.
Only appellate court decisions are binding precedent, and only (basically) on courts subordinate to court making the decision.
In terms of efficiency, it’s more efficient. Those in favor of universal injunctions are saying there should be hundreds of judges all racing to rule over the government, and to have their opinions control in the abstract as to cases that aren’t even before them.
If the government forces the same issue over and over there are plenty of remedies at hand: 1983 civil penalties against officers, sanctions against attorneys for frivolous arguments, and ultimately the court can hand the legislature everything it needs to impeach and remove a president by ruling that he / she is intentionally failing to enforce the law.
I just don't understand how you expect this to work unless the point is to make the judiciary branch entirely pointless (for government level check and balances).
What are they supposed to do in your theoretical setup? Pass the law again? Add “we really mean it this time” to the end?
Truly, fascism and autocracy are more efficient than checks and balances; not everything must be made “efficient”.
Do we chastise an oak or redwood for taking its time?
Now we get to see Americans have their legitimacy removed so they can be sent to "Alligator Alcatraz", the new prison being built just for them in the Everglades.
Because it is unlawful. Student loan forgiveness is not an entitlement. College isn’t an entitlement. These are the facts. Moreover, college is a privilege, and it’s a choice, and at its core it is an investment into your future. Having the government forgive it implies the taxpayer will pay for it. That means that essentially people who chose _not_ to go to college, by their own choice or due to their own circumstances, now have to pay for the investments of the people who chose to go. College educated people tend to make much more money too, so in essence you’ll literally be taking money from the less privileged and giving it to the more/rich. And this would be done by force. In what way would that be lawful? Why would others have to pay for your personal investments? You took out a loan, you pay it off. Leave everyone else out of it.
Secondly, something that is lawful does not need to be an entitlement. If a president can declare an air strike, costing hundreds of millions of dollars -- which I may not consent to as a taxpayer -- then he can forgive loans. The argument that the federal judge in Texas made regarding student loan forgiveness not applying to everyone could be made to PPP loan forgiveness for businesses. (I have a business but didn't receive free money.)
I guarantee somebody else has paid for something they haven't used that you have. We're a society. Part of that is sharing costs. Big reason so much is so fucked up right now is because we're doing a bad job of it.
Here's a good start. Don't have people who don't make the choice to take out loans be forced to pay off those loans. I don't think it's unreasonable that you bear the costs of your _personal_ investments for your _personal_ future. Whether or not society as a whole benefits from it is besides the point. They are _personal_ investments at their core, and they can be paid off with your higher future income. Borrow against your future, not mine. Society's part is contributing to your higher income through business at each individuals' personal discretion. Don't make the mistake thinking anybody owes you anything more. You're not entitle to a higher income even if you went to college. When you made a bad investment, you pay for it. I'm not paying for your lesbian dance theory degree, and neither is the plumber making a living without some degree.
There are already amnesty programs for teachers, social workers, etc. The solution to bail out individuals for their investments is not good policy.
By the time my loans were discharged, I had fully paid the principal and was treading water on interest. Because I paid the minimums, the interest itself had risen to above the cost of the original loans based on those high interest rates I consolidated with. I would call it predatory, and as far as I'm concerned, my debt between me and the Federal government is paid for by me. Nelnet be damned.
We, as a society, need doctors, lawyers, scientists, and engineers. College is a requirement for that.
Seems like all one would need is a case where the government won at a lower court, allowing the other party can appeal.
And if they never win, then the issue is more about legal resources than anything else, no?
Right. If the government wants to take a very broad action, it is happy to eat some individual losses here and there. Most people won't be able to sue.
What's the chance that this could be addressed via class action?
Even then, it only affects those in the class. E.g., it wouldn’t stop across the board federal enforcement as unconstitutional. It would take take a better part of a decade for that class action to move forward.
I think you’ll see this playing out very soon.
Justice Sotomayor dissents:
> Instead, the Government says, it should be able to apply the Citizenship Order (whose legality it does not defend) to everyone except the plaintiffs who filed this lawsuit.
If that’s the case, I’m curious if it could be fixed with a class action, so everyone (or everyone born in the US) is a plaintiff? If that’s legally a thing.
I read the Wikipedia article [0] and I would point out that a class defined by birth place would pass easily Scalia's test for commonality. So it seems that using a class action suit that includes every person born in US of un-documented parents would work. (But who knows what other tests the Supreme Court would come up now...)
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wal-Mart_Stores,_Inc._v._Dukes
> There is a serious question, moreover, whether this Court will ever get the chance to rule on the constitutionality of a policy like the Citizenship Order. Contra, ante, at 6 (opinion of KAVANAUGH, J.) (“[T]he losing parties in the courts of appeals will regularly come to this Court in matters involving major new federal statutes and executive actions”). In the ordinary course, parties who prevail in the lower courts generally cannot seek review from this Court, likely leaving it up to the Government’s discretion whether a petition will be filed here. These cases prove the point: Every court to consider the Citizenship Order’s merits has found that it is unconstitutional in preliminary rulings. Because respondents prevailed on the merits and received universal injunctions, they have no reason to file an appeal. The Government has no incentive to file a petition here either, because the outcome of such an appeal would be preordained. The Government recognizes as much, which is why its emergency applications challenged only the scope of the preliminary injunctions
Indeed, this is one of the concerns of the dissenting opinions.
The Universal Injunctions were a one-way rule. If the government lost any one case, the injunction would apply against the government in every other instance. However, if the government won, only that one person would be deported and the opposition would be free to try the same argument again with any of the other judges.
Christ almighty. This is why we can't have nice things.
What you describe is voting
We’re in this mess because people are not interested enough, educated enough, or engaged enough politically to make their position explicit to drive the direction of legislation and executive action.
Citizens of The United States have every tool available to to work together to shape their communities. The reality is the overwhelming majority do not do that, and you can come up with a lot of reasons why, which are structural in many cases, but the fact remains that the majority of people are not involved in the political process at all, have no desire to be an actively reject any opportunity to be.
Assuming that citizens would all of a sudden become involved because it requires a lawsuit, means that there’s the capacity to do so, which does not exist, and all we need is a catalyst.
If the number of possible catalysts that have already happened in the last decade we’re not sufficient then nothing short of a literal terminator Skynet scenario is going to cause people to take action and I’m increasingly doubtful that even that would do it.
Based on my observation from my work position, people are ready to just roll over onto their backs and have robots slice them from the belly up, because it’s easier than actually doing something that would prevent it.
I would not have thought that this is what the Constitution says, but the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of what the Constitution says. That's not in the Constitution, either, but they've appropriated that job for two centuries, so we let them get away with it. The "it's not illegal if the President does it" part is new, though they've been leading up to it for decades, so it's not really surprising.
The Court has long considered that the president has a duty to follow the law, but also that the Court can’t compel the president to follow the law. That is a political question. Congress alone can stop a president by impeaching and removing them from office. Not only can’t the Court initiate impeachments, impeachment is unreviewable by the Court.
If there’s a servile Congress, it means voters can elect a law breaker as president. They are going to get a president who breaks the law.
And this is what’s happening. People voted for an abuser, a rapist, a felon, a conspiracy theorist who lies about the outcome of elections, lies that VPOTUS can and should overturn them, and even sent a mob to have that VPOTUS assassinated for refusing to comply with that illegal order. Then boasted he’d pardon all those criminals who were in his service. And despite all of this, people voted for him again.
The people got exactly what they voted for.
“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba
And they actively vote against the will of their constituents 35% of the time. http://promarket.org/2017/06/16/study-politicians-vote-will-...
A prime example of this is the immigration system. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi... (“On the Ballot: An Immigration System Most Americans Never Wanted”). Americans never asked to import tens of millions of people from the third world. When Congress reformed the immigration system in 1965, they promised that wouldn’t happen. But for decades, there’s been a coalition of pro-foreigner liberals and pro-cheap-labor conservatives that have facilitated massive immigration that average americans never asked for.
Trump, ironically, is a reaction to the very thing the Princeton study identified.
> There is also the damage done by the Supreme Court ending the Voting Rights Act
> Kamalah would have won by a landslide
and aside from some bread-crumbs like paid leave, she was very silent in economic issues that affected many minorities...
her campaign was in la-la land [1]
[0] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/kama...
[1] https://readsludge.com/2024/11/18/the-corporate-consultants-...
[0] https://www.as-coa.org/articles/how-latinos-voted-2024-us-pr... [1] https://www.voanews.com/a/in-historic-shift-american-muslim-... [2] https://www.npr.org/2025/03/03/nx-s1-5249686/arab-muslim-vot... [3] https://thewash.org/2024/11/07/arab-american-voters-shift-to...
Remember, force is out of the question because it will provide justification for the oppression and make people more willing to accept it.
The illusion some want you to believe, is that it is.
here's a success story: marijuana. WA and CO just.. decided to legalize it. blatantly against Federal law. even if it stays inside the state, by Wickard v Filburne and the supremacy clause it was a (mild) rebellion. we stared the Feds down and they blinked.
do more of that.
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/26/nx-s1-5447450/trump-2024-elec...
The problem is that Dems are just culturally irrelevant. Most people don't care about issues, policy or the economy, they just want to cheer for a team and will justify everything their team does regardless of efficacy or outcome. Trump is the fun underdog team that everyone is talking about, the Dems are the boring party-pooper team we all love to hate. During covid, that boring became a source of needed stability, but after boring stewarded us through the crisis, nobody wanted to be associated with them again.
You can’t shape your community to overcome the power of the federal government.
Donald Trump received only 49.8% of votes in the 2024 United States presidential election.
"But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist." - Lysander Spooner (emphasis mine)
Resilient systems have to align incentives such that they work whether or not everybody has enough good will or agreeability to play along.
250 years isn't a bad run. Maybe the next Constitution can iterate and fix the incentive alignment.
It’s been ~40 years of Talk Radio in America and ~30 years of TV, which has sold entertainment as news and fine tuned the ability to have a captive voting bloc.
Producing accurate content is laborious, narratives are cheap. Facts are essentially luxury goods, and the left+center is selling them as public goods. This can never work, it takes too much to pay for and maintain the institutions which make this possible.
The right is on the other hand, being organized and “flooding the zone”, in an unending effort to reduce faith in institutions. On top of it, information from the center and left doesn’t get consumed on the right.
This took decades to set up. Today Trump’s approval ratings are down overall, but Republican support for Trump remains at its March number - 88%.
Edit: If I could introduce another metaphor; it’s hard to sell your goods, where half the market is locked behind a monopoly that cuts corners, and sells junk food but can label it as health food. Oh, and they spend their profits, accusing health food of being spurious.
Either you can have watchers all the way down and nothing gets done, or there are limits.
If you accept that framing, you accept many of that frames implications without even consciously processing them. This is one of the ways that consent is manufactured.
This ruling is stating that federal judges cannot rule that the law is blocking Trump. By accepting and adopting the frame that it is Trump vs Judges you implicitly accept that the law itself is a weapon rather than a boundary. It argues that the law is subjective, based on the judge ruling, rather than objective. It argues that there is no objective truth. To say it is judges and not the law that stops trump is to say that judges are agents of themselves and not agents of the law.
Agreeing that it is Judges vs Trump is implicitly agreeing that the law is arbitrary based on the judge ruling. Arbitrary government is authoritarian government.
The court’s decision to permit the executive to violate the constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law,” Jackson wrote. “Given the critical role of the judiciary in maintaining the rule of law … it is odd, to say the least, that the court would grant the executive’s wish to be freed from the constraints of law by prohibiting district courts from ordering complete compliance with the constitution.
This feels about as grim as the Citizens United dissent, which has been proven more and more true every day:
A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold.
As for interpretation: of course it is subjective. That's literally what they do in cases of federal and constitutional law: statutory interpretation. There's even named schools of thought for how it should be done, purposivism and textualism. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/statutory_interpretation
Is the constitution more protected or less protected?
Will trump have a harder time breaking the law or an easier time?
Many in this thread arguing about the legal minutiae of a system that only became problematic in the context of an anti-constitution anti-law president... and I just don't understand. I don't understand what reality you're living in where this is something to defend.
Hacker news has become a much more depressing place post-Covid. Musk, Zuck, the All-In guys, Bezos, Altman. All of them role models for the people here, and all of them have gone mask-off to one degree or another in their pursuit of power and wealth and public adulation.
One side of the hacker/startup coin is "look at how I [built this company|escalated privilege|retired early] by [twisting the rules of the system|exploiting a loophole|penetration testing]", and that ethos isn't entirely that far away from "did you know you can get the laws changed just by spending $50k on a senator?" or "Twitter only needs 50 engineers as long as they're all H1-B hostages".
It really feels like what we've lost is empathy and humanity.
The famous quote “give me the man and I will give you the case against him.” Comes to mind. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Give_me_the_man_and_I_will_g...
Legal settings (at least in the US), have always favored the wealthy who can find an army of lawyers to find loopholes.
I don’t agree with this, and hopefully what is currently happening raises awareness.
For example, the Patriot act post-9/11 famously gave law enforcement unconstitutional powers within 100 miles of a national border (I could be off, but this is how I remember it). If you really want to split hairs, the US has a LOT of borders if you include international airports.
I'm not particularly happy about nationwide injunctions, but this is much worse if you have a president who is not shy to "break the law now and fight it in court later". And now that Trump has shown the way, you can be sure future presidents will follow.
Another terrible outcome is that you then have federal orders applied differently from state to state (or more accurately, federal district to district). If you're in Nevada you won't get citizenship, but in Oregon you will.
This is right up there with the Presidential Immunity in terms of terrible decisions by this SCOTUS.
They're 100% coming for Obergfell and it's clear now how. They'll arrest a legal US citizen who has naturalized citizenship from illegal parents, born in a state that received an injunction but residing in a state that has not.
The representative of that person will say that they by being a citizen in the other state, they must be respected as a citizen in the other. They will cite Obergfell.
The SCOTUS will revoke their ruling on Obergfell and say, no, you are not a citizen just because there's an injunction in that other state.
The astute reader may notice that this is literally a replay of Dread Scott.
Every federal judicial district (that's one per state in smaller states, but more in larger states—California has four.)
North and South?
https://www.caed.uscourts.gov/caednew/index.cfm/cmecf-e-fili...
1. File a suit in every circuit
2. Request an injunction type that's more appropriate
Given the number of babies being born every day it shouldn't be hard to do.
The thing is, the US doesn't issue citizenship papers. So I suppose they need to apply for an SSN and get denied (since the baby is a non-citizen), which will show immediate harm.
It also begs the question: if that baby is illegal can it be deported?
The thing here is that instead of officially denying it, the administration will just "coincidentally" slow-walk everything indefinitely, then illegally exile the baby to Sudan when ICE notices they don't have proof of citizenship.
Moreover, there is literally no mechanism to prove that your parents are citizens.
Millions of citizens will be at the whim of whatever racist thug decides to hurt them that day.
Welcome to Fascist America.
"No right is safe in the new legal regime the court creates. Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law-abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship. The majority holds that, absent cumbersome class-action litigation, courts cannot completely enjoin even such plainly unlawful policies unless doing so is necessary to afford the formal parties complete relief. That holding renders constitutional guarantees meaningful in name only for any individuals who are not parties to a lawsuit. Because I will not be complicit in so grave an attack on our system of law, I dissent."
It would be more accurate to say that prior to this ruling, any of 700 district judges could unilaterally block the president from exceeding his authority under the constitution pending a review, including matters of national security, based on their own subjective view of the law. It may differ in other countries, but under the US Constitution, the judicial branch ultimately decides the limits of executive authority, not the President.
If it's truly a matter of national security, the President could always file emergency appeal and it would almost certainly be granted. If it's such a dire and immediate emergency that even those few hours were critical, it's doubtful that any President would feel obligated to obey the injunction anyway.
Far from preventing the proper functioning of government, this was one of the few remaining guardrails maintaining the proper functioning of government under unprecedented circumstances.
So either a judge can block orders that exceed the president's authority and orders that are within it, or the judge can block neither.
Not at all. Whether or not the president is exceeding their authority, a judge could block it nationally. It's not like lower court rulings haven't been overturned before.
And the bigger issue is "judge shopping". Want to block something nationally? Just find 1 of 700 judges who will rule the way you want, and file in that district.
Enjoy the chaos though, because some later administration as a revenge will very likely strip the rights of folks who can't show a naturalization certificate in the same way.
"Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."
Note the "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof". Trump's argument is that people born in America to tourist parents here for a few weeks (for example) aren't subject to the jurisdiction of America. It's a valid argument to make, even if you come down on a different side. Even the author of the 14th amendment said that was the point of that clause. Even in logical terms it makes sense: You can't just let anyone in to give birth and then collect benefits; it's unsustainable.
However, this case wasn't about citizenship. It was about the broader issue of lower courts issuing restraining orders outside their jurisdictions. It's a recipe for chaos. There's a reason why there are multiple jurisdictions, and courts are limited to their jurisdictions. What happens when two lower courts issue conflicting nationwide orders? The only court in the US that has jurisdiction over the entire country is the Supreme Court. This was a losing battle.
There's a right way and a wrong way to go about addressing problems. Court cases are sometimes more about the core issues involved than the concrete circumstances. Sure, birthright citizenship was the reason for the suit, but the core issue was judicial overreach. Don't get mad because the way your side was "winning" was by cheating, and they were stopped. Try having an actual good argument, and doing things the right way by arguing the actual case in a court.
1. The executive is doing something illegal to hundreds of thousands of people.
2. Dozens and hundreds of people sue them.
3. The executive loses in court.
4. The executive does not appeal to the supreme court the cases it lost.
5. Thus, no binding precedent that stops the illegal action in #1 is set.
This is actual lawless lunacy, and this enshrines it as SOP going forward. Is this the country you want to live in? Do you think this is how it should run?
Here's a wild idea. If the executive disagrees with the federal courts on the merits of whether or not its decisions are illegal, it can appeal up to SCOTUS, and win a case on its merits. It can't do that because even under this SCOTUS, their case has no merits.
> exercising his authority under the constitution pending a review
That is the entire bloody point of checks and balances. You are cheer-leading the complete destruction of them. The government, when challenged on the legality of what its doing, needs to win their case in court, because the courts are the final arbiters of written law.
Yes, this has been going on for decades at various levels of government.
It's very common when it comes to gun rights. The government (local/state and federal) will frequently avoid appealing if they think they might then lose the case, setting a wide precedent for millions of people.
Nationwide injunctions were never clearly authorized by statute, and letting any one of 700 district judges block a federal policy everywhere created chaos and forum shopping.
If a policy is truly unconstitutional, the proper path is a class action or taking it up to the Supreme Court
Not giving individual judges a veto over national law.
(I think there's a MUCH stronger argument to be made that the proper function of the US government has been broken by Presidents changing thing by executive order because nobody has enough votes to do much in the Senate. It seems like "nobody has the votes to make big changes" should be an indicator that not making big changes is the proper result.)
The status quo would be "issue a ruling, it may or may not get put on hold while the government appeals, eventually it gets to the Supreme Court if necessary." Seemed to be working. Republicans obviously have used this to challenge stuff themselves.
It is unclear why there is a need for giving the government an escape hatch to let them say "sure, we lost this one case, we'll stop enforcing things against these few people, we just won't appeal and will continue to do whatever we want nationally instead."
"Nobody has the votes" seems like a weird way to put it, because is implies that everyone wants to make changes, they just can't agree which changes to make. On the contrary, I think the issue is that most congresspeople do not want to make changes. Changes are scary. If your name is associated with a change, and that change becomes unpopular, it might threaten your reelection!
So it reads to me like we've ended up in a similar spot, but with the requirement that an insane amount of paperwork happens.
What this means is that it’s now ok for the orange man to break the law. Rule of law will only be upheld in very limited circumstances in very limited areas.
In the meantime, when I sue John Doe and get an injunction, they are enjoined from their conduct everywhere; but when I sue the government, it should only apply to me? Makes no sense.
IANAL but I read SCOTUS opinions regularly and this one is hard to argue with. If things should be different then we need legislative/constitutional changes.
lol, yes, like birthright citizenship written plainly into the constitution.
What good are your further legislative/constitutional changes worth if the executive can just ignore them except for the single individuals who file suit?
This is a ruling which chooses order over law. Order without justice is tyranny.
You mean like under their own judgement?
This is why we should have small government. If the government has a narrowly scoped role, the fear of the other side getting elected goes away. With huge government comes great concern about who’s in it.
As proof of that principle, how many people are really fired up about who is elected locally? How about nationally? The reason is the federal government has way too much power.
District courts do not create precedent. Precedent comes from appellate courts.
This ruling does not "restore" a functioning balance, it damages it. This has never been a problem in the past because previous administrations (regardless of politics) didn't take illegal actions daily. Framing it as "politics" is disingenuous as many of the judges ruling against Trump were appointed by him.
The system was working as intended to check an executive acting outside of the law, but once again, the supreme court continues to empower the executive.
Constitution would have to be changed
In theory it's just an injunction, but the reality is this kind of stuff takes forever to get hashed out in the courts, and Trump will be well out of office before it gets settled.
I have no problem with SCOTUS injunctions, but there are too many district courts for this to work.
The way things were heading the president was going to be forced to start ignoring injunctions, and he would have been right to do so. The Roberts court had to make this ruling for the government to function.
Except that it's been working just fine that way since before I was born, so, empirically, you're wrong.
> the president was going to be forced to start ignoring injunctions [...] The Roberts court had to make this ruling for the government to function.
So basically you're saying their way to legitimize Trump ignoring court orders is to de-legitimize an entire type of court order that has been commonplace and accepted for 50 years.
This sounds like "we'll change the law so Trump doesn't have to break it". Authoritarianism it is, then, I guess.
For the government to rule by executive order.
For the government to be able to change with the winds of Trump's opinion.
Neither of which is "functioning correctly" by my definition.
No, they will not. Remember when Breonna Taylor was summarily executed for Kenneth Walker exercising his second amendment right to night time home defense - one of the exact scenarios the gun-fundamentalists are always fantasizing about - but then the Trumpists came out on the side of licking the jackboots?
Personally, I think it is likely that sometime during this Trump "presidency" we will see him call for more national gun control (obviously framed in terms of hurting some vulnerable group). We will see most of his supporters fall right in line, just as they have been doing on everything else. There will be heaps of rationalization about how it won't affect them of course, and they might even be right.
Morals, values, and other lofty ideals mean nothing to these people, beyond being trotted out as dishonest justifications to try and trick reasonable people into supporting their movement. I'm sure they meant something at some point, but that has been long forgotten. Their only real desire appears to be unrestrained power for their team, demonstrating it by hurting people who aren't on their team. This is why it has been impossible to have an actual discussion about what they actually want, or how Dear Leader and his policies fail at everything they claim to want - there is literally nothing of substance there.
I could extend some merit to the idea that injunctions should be limited in complex cases where case law is thin and the law is less than clear. When executive orders are clearly unconstitutional, however, I do not then see any reason for limits.
The law that states that growing wheat on your own land is interstate commerce.
My reading is that under the previous system, a single district could prevent an order federally, even if every other district judge agreed with the new order.
I don't see why a single district should be able to influence the entire country. I would understand that they could limit powers in their district, and potentially challenge laws at a state level, and then federally.
Let's look at how this could have impacted a topic that gets my attention in the US, gun laws.
I'm definitely left, so let's say a president came in and made some order about changing gun laws and made it harder to get a gun.
It seems to me, that if that were to occur, a single judge in a gun-loving district could block the order universally for all the other states?
That doesn't seem right. It does make sense that they could say that law doesn't apply to our district, and we will challenge that law being applied to our state and if the state agrees, they could then challenge the law federally.
I'm obviously making up a ton of stuff about a system that I don't understand.
Should a single person be able to pull a fire alarm? Or do we need building-wide consensus first?
Guess now not everyone has the same rights in America.
They can treat you how they wish unless you personally take it up. What next, personalised constitutions? rules for thee and not for me.
"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. (https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.htm)
It seems like it was ruled that instead of 1000, much more local, people able to protect constitutional rule with the force of the judiciary, we now have 9.
If you analyze only based on power changes, now fewer people have more power.
You are secretly calm because you think it won't affect you.. until it does.
This ruling is idiotic even if you are generally opposed to nationwide injunctions. Birthright citizenship is a fundamental and clear cut right. Any attempts to overturn that must meet a high burden of justification. Temporarily suspending such attempts until the matter can firmly be decided causes the least amount of harm and should be allowed.
That's pre-2025 thinking. Now, in 2025, there are no clear cut rights, other than, maybe, gun ownership.
Oh but the high court of chancery in england! They didn't have them, so we can't either! Never mind that is 2025, we're a different nation, the federal government has a lot more power, and we have these injunctions for all of Biden's term and they had plenty of opportunity to stop them but said nothing when it was for protecting gun rights or denying women's healthcare.
The US has a three-tiered judiciary that moves slowly, Congress has a very high threshold for impeachment and removal (and a slow process), and the order of succession is basically locked in for four years. The people are not easily moved to action, and it's doubtful how much they could realistically accomplish.
Universal injunctions were a Band-Aid fix, one of the very few avenues our system permitted for there to be any rapid institutional response to illegal and immediately harmful policy. But that is no more.
As an exercise, what happens if a president issues a "throw enemies in the woodchipper" executive order? How many hours or days would it take the other branches of government to legally nullify the order? (What they can do in practice is another question.)
It's an extreme example, but a future admin could use the current admin's reasoning to unilaterally confiscate guns and force you to be a plaintiff in federal court to get relief.
In the USA, some judges are elected, hearings can be televised, fragmented laws nationwide, court filings often public.
In UK the opening of the judicial year happens in a church service (i.e. biblical punishment is common), many judges are freemasons,court filings not public, courts control what gets to media, the court below supreme court can, and routinely do, block cases from getting to supreme court. And More. In short UK judiciary is institutionally corrupt with the elected and unelected the one and the same but press won't say it.
1) There is no written constitution, the supreme court in the UK is only there to interpret existing laws as written not to interpret differences between "tiers" of law
2) The UK has a system that can pass new laws, generally by simple majority so any decision rendered about existing law can be made obsolete generally fairly quickly (In contrast to the current intransigence of the current US system where it is hard to pass primary legislation and virtually impossible to modify the constitution)
3) the court was only established in 2009, and evidently we haven't done much to empower it
A better comparison country might be places like Canada or Australia who do have a written (and harder to modify) constitution.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/democracy...
They tried to steal an election four years ago by sabotaging the vote certification.
Remember: federal power is delegated from the states, not the other way around.
At the top of the Articles, it's pretty clear that the delegates of the states have come together to establish a league of states. At the top of the Constitution, it's explicitly stated that "We the People […] do ordain and establish."
The descent to authoritarianism usually begins with a party gaining enough power that it can override the checks and balances. Which often involves rewriting the constitution.
The US system has power more fragmented than most. In Europe, the Senate often doesn't wield any power (it rubber stamps anything the legislature approves). The executive is a part of the legislative.
In parliamentary system, individual MPs are "whipped" into voting with the party, and can basically be pushed out of power if they don't go along with it. If the party in power has a large majority, there is nothing but the courts to stop them from passing whatever they want.
So, deporting people to a third-country (another decision SCOTUS allowed this term) has a simple balancing test: stay here and be fine or possibly deport a Chinese citizen to El Salvador, which could cause incredible harm. So even ignoring th elikelihood of how the issue is decided, the balancing test favors enjoining third-party deportation.
So in this case, we had a universal injunction against an executive order removing birthright citizenship. This fails on two fronts:
1. As justices noted, it's highly unlikely that the order will be held up as constitutional. There is case law on this. The language of the 14th amendment is clear. The exact issue was discussed at the time. This has no hope in a non-corrupt court of succeeding.
2. Given other decisions, bona fide US citizens could be deported to CECOT and detained indefinitely with no due process. So it should be stayed because of the potential harm.
What SCOTUS did today was say the order revoking birthright citizenship was unlikely to succeed but it allows the administration to proceed anyway while hte issue is litigated in the courts, which could take years.
That's how corrupt this court is.
People have been fed this propaganda that Supreme Court justices are apolitical legal scholars who come down from their tower to issue judgements and keep things in check. It couldn't be further from the truth. Supreme Court justices are political appointees that dress up their political positions in legalese.
Example 1: this court invented the "major questions doctrine" whereby the court decides a matter is large enough that the court gets to override both the administrative and legislative branches.
Example 2: they also invented the "historical traditions doctrine", which is used selectively. For example, abortion was completely legal 200+ years ago. Ben Franklin even published at-home instructions on how to perform an abortion [1].
Example 3: in the wake of the Civil War there was huge violence not from the freed slaves but from white people towards former slaves, most notably with the Colfax massacre. The Supreme Court went on a white supremacist tear during Reconstruction, notably gutting the federal government's ability to prosecute hate crimes like Colfax [2].
Example 4: The Tiney court in the 1850s made what is perhaps one of the worst decisions ever made (ie Dred Scott), arguing from a legal and constitutional perspective that black people weren't "people".
Example 5: the Roberts court decided that moeny equals speech, gutting any legislation around campaign spending, which is a big part of how we got here.
Example 6: the presidential immunity decision will go down in history as one of the 10 or even 5 worst decisions ever made. It completely invented far-reaching immunity that essentially made the president a king, in a country that was founded on the very idea of rejecting monarchs.
Example 7: in 1984, the Supreme Court decided that in any areas of ambiguity in legislation, trial courts should defer to the agency empowered by Congress to enforce that legislation. This is the so-called "Chevron deference".
More than 40 years passed through 7 presidents (4 Republican and 3 Democrat) where both parties at different times controlled Congress. Congress declined to legislate away Chevron deference despite having ample opportunity to do so. Moreso, they intentionally wrote legislation with Chevron deference in mind yet this court decided to reverse Chevron. Yet on other cases, the court has deferred to Congress's inaction as intent.
Fun fact: Chevron v Natural Resources Defense Council was previously known as Natural Resources Defense Council v. Gorsuch [3]. That's not a coincidence. The suit involved Reagan's head of dthe EPA, Anna Gorsuch, mother of current Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch, who was humiliated and ultimately fired from the EPA while trying to destroy it from within.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2022/05/18/1099542962/abortion-ben-frank...
[2]: https://www.theroot.com/what-was-the-colfax-massacre-1790897...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Resources_Defense_Coun...
Banning a nationwide injunction against birthright citizenship is inherently different. It’s a fundamental constitutional right we are talking about. Banning birthright citizenship should not be allowed to be enforced until SCOTIS decides the matter.
Nationwide injunctions were saught and used by (self-proclaimed) conservatives to slow down and stop Biden immigration policies.
One thing they didn't talk about was structural: the court system is split up into X circuits, and each circuit is independent. Normally each circuit uses rulings from other circuits as a basis for its judgements, but circuits are pretty independent from each other. The Supremes weigh in when the circuits conflicted with each other.
The national injunctions issued by the lower court allowed the lowest level court to have more authority than an appeals court. An appellate court's decision was only binding on its circuit. Why would a lower court have more authority than an appeals court? That makes no sense.
That's outside of all the reasoning the court used to stop this practice.
That said, if an affected individual brought a suit the may be able to get an injunction, since the court ruled that universal injunctions were inappropriate.
An appellate court considers the decisions of the courts below it, so it makes sense its actions would be restricted to those courts. What makes no sense is the newly possible situation in which an action violates the U.S. Constitution in one district but not another.
It is precisely the universality and supremacy of the law which gives the lower courts the authority to make universal rulings. Just because something is federally illegal in one federal district doesn't mean it is legal in another.
The lower court doesn't have more authority than the appellate court if the appellate court can overturn the lower court.
No court has the "authority" to make arbitrary unlawful rulings.
Through what legal avenue?
With the US Supreme Court strongly tilted toward all four, its an extremely difficult hole to climb out of.
I don't see a dictatorship (anytime soon). Not out of any abundance of optimism, but simply that all four of those constituencies and the Supreme Court's dominant wing itself, are highly aligned with each other, and would all lose out if it goes that far.
So yeah. Do a "water the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants," already. The gun people were more than willing when they thought a Democrat was stealing their votes or Bill Gates was putting microchips in vaccines.
Do you feel that temporary checks (that can be easily reversed) to ensure the government is behaving in a constitutional way are ridiculous?
They don't, they appeal straight up to the 9 judges that they actually have to appease
It causes the least harm to block the birthright executive order until it’s legality can be determined. Therefore it should be blocked nationwide.
[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/presidential-documents/execu...
They can absolutely still strike down a law or executive branch policy.
This forces judges to actually do their job., instead of a nationwide injunction while they decide if they want to do their job later.
It doesn’t actually alter some fabric of our democracy or checks and balances, because the judges had already gone beyond what the constitution and congress prescribed.
Every issue that any partisan has with this country is because one branch isn’t doing their job.
The disruptive aspect of this - with concern to the birthright case that hasnt been ruled on yet - is just another example of this. Judges not doing their job.
It's impractical to rule on a subject before allowing parties to formulate coherent prepared arguments. Ruling on circumstantial evidence is a temporary stop, leaving the ruling up to an appellate which will invalidate it due to it being founded on circumstantial evidence. The injunctions were the practical way to allows all parties to formulate their case and make a legal reasoning for a ruling. Written law has to be incremental and narrow for interpretation. Otherwise it's an interpretive dance free for all in every case.
You have repeatedly implied that the jobs of Judges are something other than what you they are. Ofc you don't think they are doing what you think they should be. That's inconsequential.
A judge's job is to *judge*. They have basically zero ability to gather evidence, that is the responsibility for the parties to the case.
Would you have them issue a ruling before being presented with evidence? That makes no sense. But at the same time harm can come from not issuing a ruling. Thus we have injunctions--if a judge feels a case is likely to prevail they can issue an injunction prohibiting actions which inflict harm that can't be remedied by the resolution of the case.
What? That makes no sense. You can lookup which court and judge (or panel of judges) issued the injunctions. I do not understand why this non-existent anonymity would motivate a judge to issue an injunction.
> They can still strike down a law or executive branch policy.
Federal courts will only look at cases if there is a party with standing who engages in a lawsuit. If someone is being deported without due process, it will be hard for them to bring suit.
> This forces judges to actually do their job., instead of a nationwide injunction while they decide if they want to do their job later.
In general there are two reasons why these temporary restraining orders which have been issued. The first being that not doing so would cause irrevocable (or ridiculously difficult to revoke) harm (e.g., deporting people to a foreign jail). The second is that the TRO is used to stop something which seems illegal on its face (e.g. deporting people to countries from which they have never been).
> It doesn’t actually alter some fabric of our democracy or checks and balances, because the judges had already gone beyond what the constitution and congress prescribed.
It does alter the power dynamic of our democracy. Now, the executive branch can repeatedly perform illegal acts and only needs to stop its behavior in cases which have been decided. This checks and balances isn’t about stopping each other branch in a vacuum, the intent is to stop the government from overreaching on its citizenry. By crippling all of the lower courts, the Supreme Court has created a bureaucratic bottleneck for itself, allowing the executive branch to effectively DDoS the judicial system with case after case.
> The disruptive aspect of this - with concern to the birthright case that hasnt been ruled on yet - is just another example of this. Judges not doing their job.
No, it was the judge telling the executive branch that the executive branch must recognize the citizenship of children born on US soil. Instead of actually appealing the TRO on grounds of the legality of their actions, the executive branch has decided to complain about the legality of a court telling the executive branch to stop.
Who is supposed to tell the executive branch to stop doing something illegal, congress? Part of the point of the executive branch was to allow for some expedience, congress is slow. A judge is in a perfect position to tell the executive branch to stop, they don’t need to wait on committee and are not beholden to the president. Without the ability, the executive branch can quite literally do whatever the president wants.