Supreme Court limits ability of judges to stop Trump
An emboldened President Donald Trump celebrated a new bombshell Supreme Court ruling that clamped down on federal judges' ability to halt his policy moves by slamming federal judges who have confronted him in the past. Trump hailed the decision severely proscribing nationwide court injunctions as 'monumental' and took a victory lap in a nearly hour-long session in the White House briefing room.
'I think taking power away from these absolutely crazy radical left judges is a tremendous – this is such a big day,' Trump crowed. Throughout the frenetic start of his term, Trump has seen judges stop or stall some of his most consequential policies on immigration, deportations and birthright citizenship – as well as his moves to take on perceived rivals like law firms and universities and slash agency staff. He has signed 164 Executive Orders and counting. His administration has drawn legal challenges for deporting migrants to El Salvador, singling out individual law firms who have challenged him, and slashing grants to universities.
By issuing a sweeping ruling against the use of universal injunctions that a District Court judge can impose nationwide, the Supreme Court took one more burden away from Trump as he seeks to impose his policy agenda even when a closely-divided Congress fails to act on an issue. 'It only takes bad power away from judges .. it takes bad power, sick power and unfair power, and it's really going to be, is a very monumental decision,' Trump said Friday soon after the ruling came down.
The high court, where conservatives hold a 6-3 majority, issued the ruling about a year after handing Trump another big win, ruling that presidents enjoy immunity from prosecution for most of their official acts taken while in office. The ruling gave a big boost to Trump's campaign while he was facing four criminal charges – and allowed Trump more latitude when he took the oath for a second time in January. Trump, who railed against individual judges during his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, took on the general judicial power as a 'colossal abuse' – calling them a threat to his own authority.
'In recent months, we've seen a handful of radical left judges effectively try to overrule the rightful powers of the president to stop the American people from getting the policies that they voted for in record numbers that was a grave threat to democracy, frankly,' he said. He said the judges have attempted 'to dictate the law for the entire nation. In practice, this meant that if any one of the nearly 700 federal judges disagreed with the policy of a duly elected President of the United States, he or she could block that policy from going into effect, or at least delay it for many years, tie it up in the court system.
'This was a colossal abuse of power which never occurred in American history prior to recent decades, and we've been hit with more nationwide injunctions than were issued in the entire 20th century together.' His warning came in a term where Trump has met little resistance from House and Senate Republicans controlling Congress, even when his administration and DOGE slashed contracts and staff at agencies funded by the legislative branch.
Blasting the court's ruling as a threat was Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the trio of dissenting liberals. She accused the government of playing a 'different game' by asking the Court ' to hold that, no matter how illegal a law or policy, courts can never simply tell the Executive to stop enforcing it against anyone.' She said the government does not defend the legality of the Trump order ending birthright citizenship, and that a judge's ruling should apply only to the narrow group of people who brought suit.
'The gamesmanship in this request is apparent and the Government makes no attempt to hide it. Yet, shamefully, this Court plays along,' she wrote. '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 lawabiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship.' She said it 'renders constitutional guarantees meaningful in name only for any individuals who are not parties to a lawsuit,' calling it a 'grave an attack on our system of law.'
'By stripping all federal courts, including itself, of that power, the Court kneecaps the Judiciary's authority to stop the Executive from enforcing even the most unconstitutional policies,' Sotomayor wrote. Also torching the ruling was Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her own dissent. 'Disaster looms,' she wrote.
'What I mean by this is that our rights-based legal system can only function properly if the Executive, and everyone else, is always bound by law. Today's decision is a seismic shock to that foundational norm. Allowing the Executive to violate the law at its prerogative with respect to anyone who has not yet sued carves out a huge exception—a gash in the basic tenets of our founding charter that could turn out to be a mortal wound,' she wrote.
'What is more, to me, requiring courts themselves to provide the dagger (by giving their imprimatur to the Executive Branch's intermittent lawlessness) makes a mockery of the Judiciary's solemn duty to safeguard the rule of law,' she added. 'This decision I think opens the door very widely to granting presidents ... essentially to get away with illegal activities for quite a while, and maybe forever' if Congress and the courts to serve as a check on President Trump, said Michael Gerhardt, a law professor at the University of North Carolina, in comments to CNN.
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