After the Supreme Court on Friday held that federal district courts lack the authority to enter nationwide injunctions, President Donald Trump slammed the lower courts for their “colossal abuse of power.”
Trump held a press conference at the White House with Attorney General Pam Bondi after the ruling came down, noting the lower courts’ attempts to usurp executive authority and act as petty tyrants in the face of a democratically elected president exercising the constitutional authority of the office of the president.
He called it a “monumental victory for the Constitution, the separation of powers, and the rule of law,” saying the courts had engaged in an “excessive use of nationwide injunctions to interfere with the normal functioning of the executive branch.”
“I was elected on a historic mandate, but 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,” he continued. “In practice, this meant that if any one of the nearly 700 federal judges disagreed with a 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 — tied 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.”
He described the dynamic as a “grave threat to democracy.” Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who wrote the high court’s opinion, described it as an “imperial Judiciary” untenable in the American constitutional structure.
According to Bondi, 35 of the 40 opinions from these judges who entered nationwide injunctions came from just five of the 94 federal districts in the country.
Trump went through a litany of executive actions — essentially all of which were primary issues upon which he campaigned — that these low courts attempted to stop, including ending “birthright citizenship, ending sanctuary city funding, suspending refugee resettlement, freezing unnecessary funding, stopping federal taxpayers from paying for transgender surgeries,” and many more initiatives.
“[F]ederal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch; they resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them. When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too,” Barrett wrote in the 6-3 opinion.
While the case at hand, Trump v. CASA, Inc., centered around birthright citizenship specifically — the historically inaccurate idea that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees anyone who is ever born on American soil the right to American citizenship, including illegals — Barrett took universal injunctions to task generally, while not addressing the merits of Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship.
As Barrett noted, nationwide injunctions are a historically new phenomenon, and Justice Clarence Thomas, writing in a concurring opinion joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, warned, “Lower courts should carefully heed this Court’s guidance and cabin their grants of injunctive relief in light of historical equitable limits. If they cannot do so, this Court will continue to be ‘dutybound’ to intervene.”
At the White House, Bondi said that the judges have “tried to seize the executive branch’s power,” but added that with Friday’s ruling, “Americans are finally getting what they voted for. No longer will we have rogue judges striking down President Trump’s policies across the entire nation.”
Breccan F. Thies is a correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.