Hail to the Supreme Court for definitively slapping down the lower-court judges who’ve been issuing nationwide injunctions against President Donald Trump’s orders and actions.
Though the case touched on birthright citizenship, the court didn’t remotely decide that question, nor even offer much hint of how the justices will eventually come down on it.
Rather, the court announced that the nation’s thousand-plus federal district court judges can no longer routinely stop the Executive Branch dead in its tracks.
Their rulings can only apply to the plaintiffs actually represented in the case.
Though the door is still open to much broader rulings — if the litigants do what’s necessary to get certified for a class-action case.
But no longer can a single trial-court federal judge in Oregon, Rhode Island or wherever put on hold a president’s order to, say, stop billions in spending across the country.
This is a win not just for Trump, but for the presidency itself — and for the voters of America who elect an executive to institute policy.
In just five months, Trump has been slapped with at least 25 national injunctions on everything from spending reforms to education policy and deportation policies.
It’s a practice without precedent until recent years, though the shoe was on the other foot in the Biden and Obama eras.
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Which is why Justice Elena Kagan, one of the three dissenters in Friday’s ruling, in the past has decried “all kinds of abuses of nationwide injunctions.”
Yet Democrats and the three liberal justices are again screaming about authoritarian rule and the end of democracy, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson insisting: “Everyone, from the President on down, is bound by law.”
Which is true, as Justice Amy Comey Barrett noted in her opinion, except: “That goes for judges too.”
In other words, “Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”
Exactly: It’s up to the Supreme Court to issue national rulings on such constitutional issues; the lower courts should restrict themselves to the litigants before them.
“No kings” must apply to these judges, too.