Supreme Court Affirms Constitutional Limit on Courts’ Authority

The Court's ruling against universal injunctions is another strong affirmation of the constitutional separation of powers. It is a big deal.

Within a flurry of highly consequential and groundbreaking U.S. Supreme Court decisions, Friday’s ruling in Trump, President of the United States, et al. v. Casa, Inc., et al. stands out as a truly historic event. The Court ruled 6-3 that the Constitution does not allow federal courts to impose universal injunctions against actions of the president of the United States.

This is one of the most important blows against judicial overreach yet achieved by the Roberts court. The Court’s ruling, written by Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett (the most thoroughly proceduralist of the current justices), properly disposes of the injunction as a procedural matter, taking no position on the case’s arguments over the interpretation of the Nationality Act. The Court’s decision firmly settles a much more fundamental and extensive issue, applying a constitutional rule that its predecessors ignored for decades:

The Executive Order identifies circumstances in which a person born in the United States is not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” and is thus not recognized as an American citizen. The plaintiffs allege that the Executive Order violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, §1, and §201 of the Nationality Act of 1940. In each case, the District Court entered a “universal injunction”—an injunction barring executive officials from applying the Executive Order to anyone, not just the plaintiffs. And in each case, the Court of Appeals denied the Government’s request to stay the sweeping relief. …

The applications do not raise—and thus the Court does not address—the question whether the Executive Order violates the Citizenship Clause or Nationality Act. Instead, the issue the Court decides is whether, under the Judiciary Act of 1789, federal courts have equitable authority to issue universal injunctions.

Held: Universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts. The Court grants the Government’s applications for a partial stay of the injunctions entered below, but only to the extent that the injunctions are broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue.

The Court’s decision in Trump et al. v. Casa, Inc., et al. is truly momentous, as it restores the original constitutional principle that federal courts are authorized only to decide the disposition of specific cases, not to establish universal decisions striking down all enforcement of the laws attended to in a particular case before the court:

If anything, the approach traditionally taken by federal courts cuts against the existence of such a sweeping remedy. Consider Scott v. Donald, where the plaintiff successfully challenged the constitutionality of a law on which state officials had relied to confiscate alcohol that the plaintiff kept for personal use. See 165 U. S. 107, 109 (statement of case); id., at 111–112 (opinion of the Court). Although the plaintiff sought an injunction barring enforcement of the law against both himself and anyone “whose rights [were] infringed and threatened” by it, the Court permitted only relief benefitting the named plaintiff. Id., at 115–117. In the ensuing decades, the Court consistently rebuffed requests for relief that extended beyond the parties.

The Court’s Friday decision cites multiple precedents that affirm this principle, observing, “‘[N]either declaratory nor injunctive relief,’ the Court has said, ‘can directly interfere with enforcement of contested statutes or ordinances except with respect to the particular federal plaintiffs.’ … In fact, universal injunctions were conspicuously nonexistent for most of the Nation’s history. Their absence from 18th and 19th century equity practice settles the question of judicial authority.”

The decision thus reflects originalism as well as proceduralism: “Under the Court’s well-established precedent, see Grupo Mexicano, 527 U. S., at 319, because universal injunctions lack a founding-era forebear, federal courts lack authority to issue them,” the Court rules.

The Court’s decision explicitly rejects the notion that federal courts have greater constitutional authority than the president: “When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”

In dissent, Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson argued for unlimited judicial supremacy and accused the majority of refusing to respect the rule of law. Jackson’s dissent attempts to make what she describes as “a key conceptual point: The Court’s decision to permit the Executive to violate the Constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law.” The courts have the authority and in fact responsibility to decide … everything, Jackson argues:

Stated simply, what it means to have a system of government that is bounded by law is that everyone is constrained by the law, no exceptions. And for that to actually happen, courts must have the power to order everyone (including the Executive) to follow the law—full stop. To conclude otherwise is to endorse the creation of a zone of lawlessness within which the Executive has the prerogative to take or leave the law as it wishes, and where individuals who would otherwise be entitled to the law’s protection become subject to the Executive’s whims instead.

In short, Jackson would make the courts a collective monarch. Barrett’s treatment of this argument is a thorough demolition that applies also to the numerous lower-court judges who have taken this same position to undermine the hated Trump’s legitimate authority as president:

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.

No one disputes that the Executive has a duty to follow the law. But the Judiciary does not have unbridled authority to enforce this obligation—in fact, sometimes the law prohibits the Judiciary from doing so. … Observing the limits on judicial authority—including, as relevant here, the boundaries of the Judiciary Act of 1789—is required by a judge’s oath to follow the law.

JUSTICE JACKSON skips over that part. Because analyzing the governing statute involves boring “legalese,” post, at 3, she seeks to answer “a far more basic question of enormous practical significance: May a federal court in the United States of America order the Executive to follow the law?” Ibid. In other words, it is unecessary [sic] to consider whether Congress has constrained the Judiciary; what matters is how the Judiciary may constrain the Executive. JUSTICE JACKSON would do well to heed her own admonition: “[E]veryone, from the President on down, is bound by law.” Ibid. That goes for judges too.

Amid that ferocious thrashing of the hapless Jackson, the decision strikes down the premise behind the entire multitude of lower-court decisions that have impeded the president from performing his duty to execute the laws. As Newsweek observes,

It’s a win for Trump, whose executive orders have been held up in the courts as judges issue injunctions temporarily pausing many from taking effect as legal cases challenging those policies make their way through the legal system. These injunctions have been a check on executive authority from Democratic and Republican presidents in recent years.

That makes this ruling one of the most sweeping and significant decisions since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022 overturned the Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade which had negated all state laws regarding abortion and substituted the Supreme Court’s policy decision for those made by the states.

The big question that remains is whether the Supreme Court will see fit to apply this principle to its own power of judicial review, especially as applied to the Executive and Legislative branches of the federal government. There is a strong case to be made for that, as Southern Illinois University professor emeritus Robert Lowry Clinton argued in a 2020 paper published by The Heritage Foundation:

Of course, courts have the raw power to make any constitutional ruling that they like in a case before them, but their legitimate authority to overrule the decisions of other branches of government extends only to cases of a judiciary nature and to clear, unarguable constitutional violations. This means that when a court overturns a legislative or executive act in a doubtful case not of a judiciary nature, the affected branch is not constitutionally bound to honor that decision as it pertains to other non-parties not before the court. That is because, in such a case, though the court had the power to decide the case, it did not have the constitutional authority to bind Congress and the President to its ruling.

The limited form of judicial review established in the Founders’ Constitution allows the judicial branch to protect itself against encroachments of other branches of government, to protect individual rights in clear cases in which another branch of government has unarguably violated the Constitution, and to perform the critical judicial function of resolving disputes peacefully and in accordance with standing law. It does not allow the courts to deny the other branches of government the power to interpret the Constitution for themselves within their own acknowledged constitutional spheres of authority.

That is the next issue to be resolved in this Court’s ongoing attempt at restoration of constitutional principles and the limits of authority among the separate branches of government. Although the rulings in particular cases may frustrate people’s political goals, the Court is moving in the right direction. Those in all three branches of the federal and state governments are to be “bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution,” Article VI states. Courts, legislatures, and executives have ignored that oath for decades.

The need now is for a return to constitutional principles in which the legislature legislates, the executive executes, and the judges judge the cases before them and only the cases before them.