6-3 SCOTUS Curtails Courts’ Power to Check Illegal White House Actions

The Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision on Friday limited the ability of courts to block presidential actions that they deem illegal, with all three liberals dissenting.

The ruling, written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, checks courts’ ability to issue universal injunctions. Friday’s decision largely restricts judges to issuing orders that apply to parties in the case.

Class action lawsuits are still available as options for those seeking broad action from the courts. The decision does not rule out judges’ ability to issue bans that have a nationwide scope if the circumstances are appropriate.

But it hands the Trump administration an extraordinary win as it faces dozens of nationwide injunctions issued by judges seeking to halt its campaign to govern aggressively, and without oversight from the courts or Congress. The practical effect will be that the Trump administration will now, in dozens of those cases, ask judges to remove their nationwide blocks, allowing administration actions that those same judges already found to be illegal to go forward.

The court did not rule on the substance of birthright citizenship, the core question around which the cases were brought. Instead, it split the baby: government agencies can, in line with Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship, begin to form and issue guidance on how the policy will work. Judges must revise the portions of their rulings that keep the order from going into effect.

The result will be to limit what people who believe they are wronged by government action can do. Barrett wrote that the key here is who gets “relief.” If a pregnant woman sues to ensure that her child receives U.S. citizenship, then her victory would be limited just to her. “Her child will not be denied citizenship. Extending the injunction to cover all other similarly situated individuals would not render her relief any more complete,” Barrett wrote.

That leaves room for class action lawsuits that cover people affected by nationwide policies, though the Supreme Court has already limited those, too.

The ruling also means that judges will have fewer options for how to respond to actions that they see as illegal. Barrett says several times in her ruling that nationwide injunctions have grown across administrations. But after years of district judges, most infamously the Northern District of Texas’s Matthew Kacsmaryk, blocking Biden policies on a nationwide basis, it’s five months into the second Trump administration that the high court decides to limit the practice.

And, it did so in a case that, to many legal observers, did not seem suited to the problem. Barrett herself framed the ruling as going beyond any one case. She hit out at the judiciary beneath her, grappling with an onslaught of cases brought on by the administration’s attempt to center as much power as possible in itself.

“But federal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch; they resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them,” she wrote. “When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson argued in a dissent that the ruling deprived courts of their “power to order everyone (including the Executive) to follow the law– full stop.” The majority endorsed, Jackson wrote, “the creation of a zone of lawlessness” in which the government can do as it pleases.

The majority opinion and Jackson’s dissent peeled back tension within the court. Barrett shot back in the majority opinion that “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,” Barrett wrote.

Barrett continued to dwell on it, adding later that Jackson should “heed her own admonition” that everyone “is bound by law.”

“That goes for judges, too,” Barrett wrote.

Sotomayor, in a separate dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Jackson, said that the government had used the birthright citizenship case as “gamesmanship” to destroy a key obstacle in its path: nationwide injunctions.

Instead of asking the Supreme Court to fully halt the lower court orders, which would have required a finding that the anti-birthright citizenship order was constitutional, the Trump administration moved only for a ruling on the legality of nationwide injunctions.

That, Sotomayor argued, was telling: both the government and the majority understand that it would be “an impossible task” to show that the executive order is constitutional in light of “the Constitution’s text, history, this Court’s precedents, federal law, and Executive Branch practice.”

The result, Sotomayor said, is a dramatic new practical limit on how people can assert their rights in court.

“The Court’s decision is nothing less than an open invitation for the Government to bypass the Constitution. The Executive Branch can now enforce policies that flout settled law and violate countless individuals’ constitutional rights, and the federal courts will be hamstrung to stop its actions fully,” she wrote. “Until the day that every affected person manages to become party to a lawsuit and secures for himself injunctive relief, the Government may act lawlessly indefinitely.”

The decision bears some resemblance to the presidential immunity decision written almost exactly a year ago by Chief Justice John Roberts. In that case, the court dramatically expanded executive power – literally placing much of the presidency beyond the reach of criminal law. The practical effect of Friday’s decision on injunctions will be to cripple many peoples’ ability to halt illegal government action. Both decisions are ambiguous, but fail to deal with critical issues: in immunity, the limits of where a president can be held criminally accountable; in birthright citizenship, when cases are so harmful as to require national intervention.

These are key details that go to the core of what the rulings mean. And, in both cases, the high court stepped aside, leaving the lower courts to sort it out.