President Donald Trump celebrated after the Supreme Court moved to block lower courts from issuing universal injunctions, something that had impacted his executive orders.
The president held a news conference just over an hour after the ruling was issued and said the Supreme Court had stopped a ‘colossal abuse of power.’
‘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 in record numbers,’ Trump said on Friday.
Trump also accused lower court judges of trying to ‘dictate the law for the entire nation’ rather than ruling on the cases before them.
On Friday, Supreme Court Justices ruled 6-3 to allow the lower courts to issue injunctions only in limited instances, though the ruling leaves open the question of how the ruling will apply to the birthright citizenship order at the heart of the case.
The Supreme Court agreed this year to take up a trio of consolidated cases involving so-called universal injunctions handed down by federal district judges in Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington state. Judges in those districts had blocked Trump’s ban on birthright citizenship from taking force nationwide – which the Trump administration argued in their appeal to the Supreme Court was overly broad.
The Supreme Court’s arguments in May focused little on the merits of those universal injunctions – and on Friday, the court made clear that it is not ruling on whether the birthright citizenship orders are constitutional.
‘The applications do not raise – and thus we do not address – the question whether the Executive Order violates the Citizenship Clause or Nationality Act,’ Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, writing for the majority. ‘The issue before us is one of remedy: whether, under the Judiciary Act of 1789, federal courts have equitable authority to issue universal injunctions.’
‘A universal injunction can be justified only as an exercise of equitable authority, yet Congress has granted federal courts no such power,’ she added.
Coney Barrett took a swipe at Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, saying that her argument was ‘ at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We observe only this: [Jackson] decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.’
In her dissent, Jackson warned that the ruling allowed the president to ‘violate the Constitution’ and presented ‘an existentia threat to the rule of law.’