By a vote of 6-3, the justices repudiated the concept of universal or nationwide injunctions, which prohibit the government from enforcing a law or policy anywhere in the country.
So I’m not a legal expert, but my impression is that this means that district court judges and appellate court judges cannot affect legislation or executive orders on a national level.
If that is the case, what are good and bad to come from this? I know the idea that this is all bad will come from it, but I can see a few (from a political perspective, not a balance of powers perspective) good things to come from this.
Wouldn’t this make it easier for a democratic president to change student loan terms? Wasn’t Biden’s student loan reform overturned by a district judge?
Won’t this make it harder for the GOP to try to overturn the ACA by judge shopping?
Couldn’t a democratic president pass an executive order on gun control and make it harder for judges to overturn it?
Obviously that’ll never happen. The democrats are spineless, and the SCOTUS will uphold conservative agendas as constitutional and liberal agendas as unconstitutional.
I would think that one implication is that that one federal district court judge in Texas can no longer make orders restricting the use of abortion medications nation-wide.
Idaho, Kansas and Missouri requested late last year to pursue the case in federal court in Amarillo, Texas, after the U.S. Supreme Court issued a narrow ruling finding that abortion opponents who first filed the case lacked the legal right to sue.
Why should Idaho, Kansas and Missouri be able to go to a friendly federal district judge in Texas to bring their challenges, arguing that the FDA approval is harming their anti-abortion laws?
Why shouldn’t they be required to make their case in federal courts in their own states, rather than seeking out the strongest federal judge oppnent of the abortion medication, in Texas?
It means, without the slightest bit of hyperbole, that we no longer have a working judicial branch of government, remotely capable of acting as any kind of check or balance on the abuses of the executive branch.
If the president can issue a decree (without any input from the legislature) in, clear, blatant contravention of an article of the constitution, and the judicial branch is not able to say “no you can’t do that”, then we don’t have a Judicial branch of government.
Henceforth the American judiciary is purely for sending poor people to prison and signing off on divorces it no longer has any role in government.
That would indeed be bad if that’s what the Supreme Court had said, but it didn’t.
The case didn’t address the substantive powers of the district courts. They have full power to review the constitutionality of federal statutes and orders. The constitutionality of birthright citizenship was not in issue in this case.
What the Supreme Court said was that district court judges have limited powers to issue nation-wide injunctions, if the district court finds that a federal law or order is invalid. They are to give remedies to the parties before them, which is how injunctions normally work, rather than one trial judge give an injunction nation-wide.
Historically, it’s not clear when nation-wide injunctions were developed. Some legal scholars say they were very rare prior to the 1960s, while others say they were not used at all for the first 175 years of the Constitution.
It appears that they first started to be used more broadly in the 1960s, and really took off during the Obama presidency.
The decision mentioned going for a class action rather than a nationwide injunction. I’m sure the plaintiffs considered this the first time around and had a good reason not to do it. But it did seem from Alito’s concurrence (scroll down in here) that he’s worried a class action will be accepted by more of his colleagues. So the plaintiffs are trying it:
I have seen a few articles, including an op ed in the New York Times, saying that class action is somehow better for democracy than a nationwide injunction. Maybe a op ed word limit is too short to really explain this, but it made no sense to me.
I think the idea is that without the universal injunction , you don’t have a single judge with this sort of power :
Based in Amarillo, Texas, Kacsmaryk has issued several universal injunction since his 2017 nomination to the court. Some of these intended to block federal policies, such as protections for transgender workers, the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of medications, and staffing minimums at nursing homes.
It’s not like only one side can use universal injunctions.
The difference is that in class actions a judge has to certify a class- in this particular case, there might be (almost) no difference between an injunction that applies only to the members of a class in a class action lawsuit , depending on what the class is. If the class is " “All children who have been born or will be born in the United States on or after February 19, 2025, who are designated by Executive Order 14,160 to be
ineligible for birthright citizenship, and their parents.” , then there will be little difference between the injuction in a class action lawuit and a universal injuction. However, if an injunction is granted in a class action lawsuit brought by a number of states, it would possibly only apply to states that are part of the class - and presumably Texas or Florida could choose to be excluded from the class, just as you or I could exclude ourselves from a class action suit against Apple regarding iPhones. Although it’s possible that a judge might decide the class can only receive complete relief through a universal injuction, depending on the specifics. This decision did not rule them out in all circumstances.
No hyperbole at all. This is a terrifying step towards a unitary executive. It is putting a real limit on the judiciary’s power to block unconstitutional and illegal laws and executive orders.
There are two outs, though. States can sue, and rulings can apply to the entire state. Classes can be certified and the rulings can apply to the entire class. Maybe class actions will become standard for cases like this, but that is not how things are done today.
It means that any given ruling only applies to the parties in that case. If the president sends the national guard to my city, and says they can live at my house, and I get an injunction blocking that, then they can be moved to my neighbor’s house, and they’ll have to get their own injunction.
A particular devious ramification is that the government can win by losing. They accept the loss in every case, and don’t appeal, so it never moves up to a higher court that can review the order and issue a universal injunction. This can continue house by house or state by state until there is a patchwork of places where the constitution applies and doesn’t apply.
This also will overwhelm the court system. Instead of one or a very few lawsuits against the government, there will have to be thousands.
Just because there have been some bad universal injunctions in the past doesn’t mean they are a bad tool. The bad injunctions can be appealed. If they are upheld, then maybe the injunction was the right decision (or at least the inevitable decision of a reactionary Supreme Court).
Yeah and the thing being fought is not some esoteric edge case at the peripheries of established Presidential powers (which SCOTUS has no problem with as long the president in question is a Democrat.) . It is “can the president overturn the 14th amendment simply by saying so”, so this ruling says the 14th amendment only applies in California, the rest of America best show suitable reverence to their God emperor before he overturns some more bits of the constitution
