Would someone enlighten me as to why this is a good thing, and not a bad thing? I understand why Trump supporters would be happy about this in the short term, but surely the long term ramifications of this will mean eventually there's going to be cases where someone you don't like is in the WH, and the Judicial Branch is going to be extremely weakened now in comparison to the Executive.
Am I missing something?
-CryptoLutheran
Well, if we ignore the legal questions (from my admittedly cursory knowledge of it, it
looks to me like
legally speaking the decision was correctly) and look at it just from a practical view, it's because it halts the abuse of universal injunctions.
So, let's go through things. If someone sues over a policy or law or whatever to try to stop it because they think it's illegal or unconstitutional, the actual process of the lawsuit takes a while. So they can ask for a preliminary injunction, which says that it can't be put into effect during that time period. Normally, injunctions just bind the particular parties (while providing some degree of precedence for future people who might sue over the subject), but judges--especially more recently--can issue what's called a universal injunction, which says the law/policy/whatever can't be enforced against
anyone. Universal injunctions were once very rare (they were originally nonexistent; I don't think there was a single one prior to the 20th century, and even then they were quite rare), but have become increasingly common more recently, particularly over the last decade or two.
There are, policy-wise, some merits to them, but since we're talking about the demerits, the most obvious demerit is what is called forum shopping or judge shopping. Basically, if you don't like a law/policy/whatever, it's possible to launch the lawsuit in areas where you are very likely to get a sympathetic judge. Ordinarily this wouldn't be that big of a deal, because even if they rule unfairly that can possibly be fixed on appeal, but those are exactly the judges most likely to issue a universal injunction. Which means, effectively,
one district judge (and a selectively picked one at that) is able to declare a law invalid for the entire country. A case can go up in front of 100 different district judges, and 99 can say there's no need for an injunction... but if the
one guy who says yes decides to issue a universal injunction, then wham! They get to overrule every single one of those other judges. And until the case gets decided, or a higher court decides to lift the injunction, that puts the whole thing on pause despite them being the only one to rule that way.
And it should be noted that when Biden was president and the Democrats controlled congress, conservatives
absolutely used this trick. Find a policy you don't like, have someone file where it's very likely to be heard by someone like
Matthew Kacsmaryk, and you've got a good chance of putting it on hold for the whole country. And it should be noted that liberals were complaining about it then. See, for example, this article from The Atlantic (a liberal source) complaining about it in 2023:
Nationwide injunctions have become a serious problem in American law.
www.theatlantic.com
And here's an article from Vox (again, a liberal source) discussing the decision after it was handed down, and pointing out the justices had a point here:
This decision isn’t really about birthright citizenship.
www.vox.com
During the Biden administration, MAGA-aligned federal judges in Texas routinely handed down nationwide injunctions on highly dubious grounds. Indeed, this practice so frustrated Biden’s Justice Department that, even after Trump won the 2024 election, Biden’s solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, filed a brief asking the justices to limit their use.
The best argument against these broad orders is that they place too much power in individual judges, and in plaintiffs who can often shape which judge hears their case. As Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in a 2020 opinion, “there are currently more than 1,000 active and senior district court judges.”In a world with nationwide injunctions, plaintiffs can shop around for the one judge in America who is most likely to be sympathetic to their cause, and potentially secure a court order that no other judge would hand down.
And note that, aside from Vox being a liberal source, the specific author (Ian Milhiser) is hardly any fan of Trump or any of the Republican-appointed justices; at the time of me writing this, six of the seven last articles he wrote on the site are him complaining about how the decisions said justices made were bad ones (the remaining one is the above).
Granted, I doubt most of the Trump supporters cheering on this decision care much about the underlying legal issues, or are thinking too much about how this could end up hurting them during the next Democratic presidency (one is reminded of all the Democrats who were calling for the filibuster to be abolished towards the end of Biden's term--if they had gotten their wish, then they'd now be
completely at the mercy of the Republican-controlled House, Senate, and Presidency, whereas with the filibuster in place, Republicans are more limited). Still, as a legal matter the argument against them is reasonable, and as a more practical matter there were serious issues with the way universal injunctions were being issued.
