As he had promised during the campaign, President Trump issued an executive order early in his second term banning birthright citizenship, the policy of granting citizenship to anyone who happens first to see the light of day in the US. Immediately, lawsuits ensued and local federal judges issued injunctions on the administration’s move to enforce the ban. Many other such injuctions were granted by judges against other actions by Trump.
In the consolidated case of Casa v. Trump, today the Supreme Court ruled, 6-3, on the legality of those injunctions, but not on the content of the birthright citizenship ban itself. Speaking for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote:
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. When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too. The Court today puts an end to the “increasingly common” practice of federal courts issuing universal injunctions.
The decision is thus a clear win for the White House, whose hands have been tied by the myriad federal judges willy-nilly issuing injuctions against executive actions they happened to disagree with. Insofar as the executive order at the heart of the case is concerned, the decision permits planning on the part of the executive for the implementation of the ban, but does not address itself to the validity of the ban itself. That will have to wait for another day, but, even so, the ruling constitutes a major victory for President Trump.
For more, see Townhall.