“Universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts,” the Supreme Court ruled today in a big win for Donald Trump’s Executive Order on so-called “Birthright Citizenship,” and a strong rebuke of power-hungry lower-court judges. “The Court grants the Government’s applications for a partial stay of the injunctions entered below, but only to the extent that the injunctions are broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue.”

The 6-3 Trump v. Casa opinion, written by the lately beleaguered Justice Amy Coney Barrett, concluded, “The issuance of a universal injunction can be justified only as an exercise of equitable authority, yet Congress has granted federal courts no such power.” Furthermore, “When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”

Lower courts must now reconsider hundreds of federal lawsuits filed by litigious activists against Trump administration policies on a broad range of issues.

Now, the background: On President Donald Trump’s first day back in office, he issued an executive order titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” It affirmed that what we’ve been arguing for 15 years is the correct interpretation of the 14th Amendment: Birthright citizenship does not apply to babies born to illegal aliens, and the framers of the amendment would be appalled to see how it’s being abused today.

You can read Mark Alexander’s analysis about that debate here and most recently specific to this SCOTUS case here.

Naturally, several district judges immediately swatted down Trump’s EO with nationwide injunctions. I argued in April that the Supreme Court can and should rein in what has become a gross abuse of power by district judges. As I said then, what President Thomas Jefferson once called the “despotic branch” has become a real problem for Trump. The three branches are supposed to be coequal, but district judges on a power trip seem bent on blocking the chief executive from even running his own branch.

When the Supreme Court took up a case involving Trump’s birthright EO, the focus was not on the question of constitutional interpretation but whether a district judge is more powerful than a president. A single Supreme Court justice can’t block a president. Why can a district judge?

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Barrett and five of her fellow justices determined that a district judge is not, in fact, more powerful than a president.

During arguments in the case, left-wing Joe Biden appointee Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson complained that the Trump administration’s argument amounted to a “catch me if you can” justice system. “Your argument says ‘we get to keep on doing it until everyone who is potentially harmed by it figures out how to file a lawsuit, hire a lawyer, etc,’” Jackson said. “I don’t understand how that is remotely consistent with the rule of law.”

Jackson read her hyperbolic dissent from the bench, departing from the customary pleasantries by saying, “With deep disillusionment, I dissent.” She harrumphed that “this Court’s complicity in the creation of a culture of disdain for lower courts, their rulings, and the law (as they interpret it) will surely hasten the downfall of our governing institutions, enabling our collective demise.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor likewise read a lengthy dissent from the bench, saying the decision gives the president “the go-ahead to sometimes wield the kind of unchecked, arbitrary power the Founders crafted our Constitution to eradicate.”

In Barrett’s majority opinion, she dropped a 30,000-pound MOP on Jackson’s assessment: “We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”

She added, “It is unecessary [sic] to consider whether Congress has constrained the Judiciary; what matters is how the Judiciary may constrain the Executive. Justice Jackson would do well to heed her own admonition: ‘[E]veryone, from the President on down, is bound by law.’ That goes for judges too.”

No one ever accused left-wing judges of consistency, though. In remarks in 2022, Justice Elena Kagan opined, “It can’t be right that one district judge can stop a nationwide policy in its tracks and leave it stopped for the years that it takes to go through the normal process.”

When given the chance to rein in that practice during a Trump presidency, however, she dissented. As constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley observed, “Notably, Justice Kagan who condemned these universal injunctions during the Obama Administration has found a comfort level with those injunctions during the Trump Administration.”

This is a big win for Trump, but there’s a caveat, and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito warned of it in their concurring opinion. As political analyst Sean Davis summed it up, “The Supreme Court completely punted on the issue of third-party class certifications, which will be the gimmick now used to get around the universal injunction ban.” In short, state-plaintiffs can still lobby for a universal injunction as the only method of complete relief.

Justice Thomas rarely speaks during arguments, but when he does, it’s worth listening. He pointedly noted, “We survived until the 1960s without universal injunctions.”

I believe the Republic will not only survive but also benefit from limiting the power of district judges. That does not and should not give a president carte blanche, but neither should a president who won 77 million votes by promising to do certain things be stymied by an unelected judge from The Swamp.

Updated

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