In June 2018, following endless litigation against President Trump’s “travel ban,” the Supreme Court stated the obvious: The president has full authority to regulate and deny entry to foreign nationals at will. Yet the lower courts continue to come back for more and are even demanding that the Trump administration hand over more information to these same litigants who should not have standing to sue, per the Supreme Court decision.
Will Trump’s victory Monday at the Supreme Court for his enforcement of public charge laws have any greater success than the travel ban has had in the courts? It’s up to the president and Congress to check these rogue judges.
By a vote of 5-4, the Supreme Court agreed to stay the injunction placed on Trump’s public charge law by a New York district judge. It’s not a surprise that five justices understand the absurdity of a lower court enjoining a modest enforcement of a long-standing law against prospective immigrants accessing welfare and then receiving a green card.
What is more important, however, is the concurrence written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, because it gets to the heart of the judicial insanity grinding our sovereignty to a halt and hampering any effort by President Trump to enforce unambiguous statutes on the books.
No matter how many times these lower courts get slapped down by the Supreme Court, they feel they can still come back for another round, even on the same issue, and halt an entire policy, beyond legitimate litigants with standing before the court. Gorsuch wrote, “It would be delusional to think that one stay today suffices to remedy the problem.” Clearly observing this illegitimate trend of nationwide injunctions issued by forum-shopped judges in numerous other cases, Gorsuch called on his colleagues to “at some point, confront these important objections to this increasingly widespread practice.”
Much as in Justice Thomas’ concurrence in Trump v. Hawaii, Gorsuch observed that universal injunctions, used as ad hoc judicial vetoes on broad presidential authorities or statutes, clearly violates the limited scope of judicial power.
“When a court goes further than that, ordering the government to take (or not take) some action with respect to those who are strangers to the suit, it is hard to see how the court could still be acting in the judicial role of resolving cases and controversies,” wrote Gorsuch in his concurrence.
Gorsuch went even further to illustrate some of the political chaos, absurdities, and undemocratic outcomes that are resulting from this unconstitutional practice. “As the brief and furious history of the regulation before us illustrates, the routine issuance of universal injunctions is patently unworkable, sowing chaos for litigants, the government, courts, and all those affected by these conflicting decisions.”
Finally, Gorsuch took it to the next step and explained, as I’ve been warning for two years, that once you legitimize this game of forum-shopping and judicial vetoes, there’s nothing stopping the Democrats from coming back for endless rounds of this:
Another example of the left abusing the courts to violate the Constitution and try to hamstring Trump working to make America a better place to live.