Supreme Court Says 'No Way'

Local judges cannot usurp executive authority; the reign of lawfare is over

No Way, photogravure etching by Peter Miller

June 27, 2025 — five months and a week after President Trump’s inauguration

Today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Trump v Casa means the American people will finally get what they overwhelmingly voted for in November 2024. The lawfare-driven reign of a handful of local judges is over. No longer will they be able to nullify Executive action that is fully within the scope of Executive authority. Can a local District Court judge issue a universal nationwide injunction blocking Executive Orders of the elected President of the United States? ‘No way’, said the Supreme Court, in a 6 - 3 decision written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett. As Attorney General Pam Bondi pointed out in an informative press briefing, ‘The judges have tried to seize the Executive Branch's power, and they can-not do that.’ There are 94 judicial districts; 35 of the 40 nationwide injunctions blocking Executive Orders came from five judicial districts: Maryland, DC, Massachusetts, California, Washington. Those local judges can decide cases involving specific individuals within their districts, but nationwide, universal applicability of those decisions — which was always absurd — has ended.

Neither the Judiciary Act of 1789, its early applications, nor the founders’ clear understanding of the limits of judicial authority from British practice at the time, enable local courts to issue universal injunctions. Justice Barrett distinguishes between ‘universal’ and ‘complete’ judicial remedies, observing that in the case law, ‘complete’ refers only to the satisfaction of the specific litigants, not to everyone and his brother, and in no way to ‘nationwide’ applicability. To extend rights in equity from specific litigants to everyone universally, nationwide would stretch judicial authority to the breaking point. Today’s Supreme Court’s decision saved the lower courts from issuing further ill-advised decisions likely — or perhaps designed — to provoke border violence such as has already occurred in Los Angeles.

Only five years ago, in 2020, riots in 40 cities throughout the United States, including attacks on courthouses and police stations, intimidated local judges and officials into giving the rioters a free pass for their mayhem. Senator Tom Cotton noted: ‘Progressive prosecutors refused to do their job as more than 500 violent riots broke out across the nation. Over 2,000 police officers were injured, and line-of-duty deaths rose by 28 percent. Dozens of Americans were killed, and between $1 billion and $2 billion dollars’ worth of property damage was inflicted.’ Supreme Court Justices too have been threatened, by name, by prominent Democrat Senator Schumer. These threats are not mere rhetoric, as they called forth attempts by followers to harm Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh in their homes. Threats against federal judges doubled from 224 in 2021 to 457 in 2023. It’s a dangerous job. Not only the threat environment for the judiciary is at stake in this case, but for the general public as well. Public safety is the bedrock responsibility of any government, and yet all of the ‘advanced’ nations, not only the United States, failed this essential test by inviting in violent criminals without even the most cursory vetting. Acting as if the same collective madness seized them all at once, they all received with open arms and taxpayer gifts the inmates of prisons and madhouses, and gang members, that their former countries were only too glad to dump into America and Europe. President Trump with his consummate common-sense stopped that madness. And now the Supreme Court too says ‘no way’. Many genuine refugees and asylum-seekers have also sought and gained entry, but the Trump Administration has made it clear its first priority is deporting violent criminals. So selective enforcement is taking the place of the vetting that should have been done in the first place, while removing financial and other incentives stimulating excessive immigration.

President Trump’s Executive Order 14160 of January 20, 2025, his first day in office, Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship, disallowed citizenship to any child of whom either parent was unlawfully present in the United States when the child was born. It outlawed the well-known practice of conceiving ‘anchor babies’ to contravene legal immigration procedures and buttress appealing ‘family-separation’ stories for media and NGOs running the child-trafficking racket. Within three days of EO 14160, the NGO child-trafficking complex found a complasisant federal judge in Washington State. He put the Order on hold (a Temporary Restraining Order), after which another judge in Maryland prevented the order from taking effect (Preliminary Injunction) until the legal issue would be resolved. The legal issue is fairly simple, as these things go: Does the Judiciary Act grant local courts the authority to stop Executive actions nationwide and universally? The Supreme Court rules today that local courts possess no such authority, nor have they ever possessed it.

The three dissenting Justices cite Constitutional claims of Equal Protection to justify a ‘universal’ injunction, one that applies not only to the specific plaintiff, but to all others similarly situated. But the Justice Department very carefully avoided Constitutional arguments, focusing instead on the exact limits of the authority Congress had granted district courts in the Judiciary Act and in subsequent case law. The Supreme Court found that such ‘universal’ and ‘nationwide’ scope of authority as the local judges profess to exercise simply does not exist, and never had existed. And as the ‘similarly situated’ language suggests, class-actions (pursuant to Rule 23) provide exactly the sort of relief that groups of aggrieved citizens can already obtain. The dissenting Justices complain this is too expensive, but the more-than-ample resources of the lawfare crowd belie that claim.

Justice Barrett brushes away Justice Jackson’s dissenting opinion as a plea for judicial supremacy which does not even bother to delve into statute or case law:

‘Justice Jackson, however, chooses a startling line of attack that is tethered neither to these sources nor, frankly, to any doctrine whatsoever. Waving away attention to the limits on judicial power as a 'mind-numbingly technical query', she offers a vision of the judicial role that would make even the most ardent defender of judicial supremacy blush. 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.’

Justice Jackson’s mind is particularly numbed by references to ‘the High Court of Chancery in England at the time of the adoption of the Constitution’, apparently preferring her own version of Constitutional history to any actual inquiry, technical or otherwise. President Trump’s Executive Order 14160 must be illegal because, like the lower-court judges, she doesn’t like it. Justice Sotomayor’s arguments are even more absurd, being premised on states losing federal funding if EO 14160 is implemented, and asserting that the Supreme Court should automatically obey the rulings of lower courts.

One might wish that the dissenting Justices had marshalled better arguments, lest a future president take undue advantage of the freedom from interference by a meddlesome judiciary with Executive action. There are rarely if ever any final decisions in the Supreme empyrean, however, because the Justices wish to preserve their own freedom to restrain the Executive if they deem it necessary. The public-safety case, so vividly presented by President Trump and Attorney General Bondi, forms the inescapable ‘penumbra’ of the legal case, not compelling today’s decision, but lending enough urgency to give the Executive the latitude he needs to do the job he was elected to do.