Law Prof on MSNBC: Supreme Court’s Republican Justices Took Away Lower Courts’ Most Powerful Tool For Reining in Trump
University of Michigan law professor Leah Litman commented Friday on MSNBC about the Supreme Court’s decision on individual federal judges issuing “nationwide injunctions” on presidential orders — particularly on President Trump’s effort to change the interpretation of birthright citizenship:
LEAH LITMAN, MSNBC LEGAL ANALYST: What the Republican justices decided is, as to the individual plaintiffs who filed suit, courts cannot award them nationwide injunctions. That is, the only thing courts can give these individual plaintiffs is a determination that their children would be United States citizens. But as to the states that challenged this executive order, the Supreme Court says: “We are not deciding whether a nationwide injunction is necessary to provide the states with complete relief.” And therefore, they send the case back down to the lower courts to make that determination initially. Now, that doesn’t mean the executive order is going to go into effect immediately. The executive order indicates that it contains a 30-day period in which the administration will create some sort of guidelines and process to figure out how it will be implemented. And during the oral argument, the Solicitor General said their position is that the 30-day period had not started, because the lower courts had enjoined the executive order before it went into effect. And so, therefore, there will be at least a 30-day period before the executive order is allowed to go into effect. And again, during that period, it’s likely that lower courts will be determining whether the states-in order to remedy the harms that this order causes them-can receive nationwide relief. I just want to note the Democratic appointees’ strong dissents in this case. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson calls the Court’s decision an existential threat to the rule of law. Justice Sotomayor’s dissent says, No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates. She calls the Court complicit in a grave attack on our system of law. The reality is: the Supreme Court’s Republican justices took away lower courts’ single powerful tool-the most powerful tool-for reining in the Trump administration and holding them accountable to the law. MSNBC HOST: This sounds like a giant win for the Trump administration.
