Editors at National Review Online urge the nation’s highest court and legislative branch to work together on new limits for other federal judges.
The Trump administration has been ensnared in a Lilliputian thicket of nationwide injunctions almost since the moment that Donald Trump was sworn in and began issuing executive orders. Trump and his partisans have raged against these orders, many of them issued by individual district judges in deep-blue districts on very short time frames. They have particularly entangled Trump’s deportation efforts and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
Trump and others in his administration have tried slicing through these knots rather than putting in the legal work to untie them. The administration is also asking the Supreme Court to declare that such injunctions are beyond the powers of federal courts. We share many of Trump’s concerns, and so should Democrats who hope to retake the presidency someday. While the volume of orders binding Trump has been unprecedented, nationwide injunctions by individual judges in sympathetic locales have bedeviled the last two Democratic presidents as well.
We think the better answer, however, is for both the Court and Congress to place limitations on the use of nationwide injunctions rather than abolish them entirely. Congress should play the leading role in that process. We can hardly think of a better test case for reviving the national legislature’s capacity to enact bipartisan legislation that improves the functioning of the federal government while fortifying its respect for individual rights and the rule of written law.
After all, judicial activists hamstringing the executive’s power to govern is bad, but it is also destructive for the executive branch to arrogate powers belonging to Congress or the courts, trample constitutional rights, and rule by presidential fiat or unaccountable bureaucratic dictate. The past decade and a half have not been short on examples of all of these abuses, for which the intervention of the courts has been an essential check on an overgrown executive and administrative state.
