Transcription
START to dry it out and heat it back up through the 4th of July. Back to you.
All right, Kylie, thanks. It is the decision that the entire country was waiting for. The Supreme Court ruled on universal injunctions. Joining me this morning to break it all down, David Cole, a constitutional law attorney.
Good morning to you.
Good morning.
So, as we talked about before, this started out with birthright citizenship, then local district judges, federal district judges put a stop to that and put an injunction in place. So the question is, did they exceed their power?
Exactly. The Supreme Court said, "Look, here's the question." And it says expressly, "The question of birthright citizenship order and whether it's valid or not before us." The question here is whether the District Court, trial court, could grant an order about just the people who challenged the law. So it couldn't apply to those people, or whether it could draft a broader order that applied to the entire United States government, its entire immigration operation. And it said, "No. Go on the second, all the court could do here, except under the laws that govern the court system, is to grant an order about the people immediately in front of it." It now, while the merits of birthright citizenship aren't in front of the court, they say, obviously, this has a very significant effect on the administration's ability to implement that order, because instead of one lawsuit, now you got a whole bunch of proceedings that are going to be going on.
Okay. So this is kind of referred to as lawfare. I mean, certainly the Democratic Party has done it more vehemently here in the last several months. Does it put an end to that or are there ways around it? The court pretty much says, "We're putting introduction," it describes how this practice of nationwide injunctions started and kind of grew and grew and grew. And it pointed out towards the end of the Biden administration, I mean, and it's true, you remember that you couldn't pass a law without somebody enjoining it somewhere. And so President Trump takes office. He's very active. He signs a lot of orders, and boom, boom, boom. We have injunctions everywhere. And the court expressed some frustration with that and said, "This is a little bit too much court. We're supposed to have elected representatives putting their laws in place and in courts kind of interpreting disputes about those. But not every law automatically runs to Congress all the time." So they attempted, at least in the way they wrote it, to be bipartisan about it, Democratic and Republican administrations lately. The issue at hand is obviously one that's significant to the Republican administration. And I don't know if you can expand on the dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson. What did that say?
Well, it talked about a couple of things, but the point of the majority opinion was, "This court is really into history. We go back in time. We look at what were people thinking about when they drafted the Constitution, when that put the federal courts in place." And the majority says, "There just wasn't anything like this back then. This is a modern invention, and we can't go around reinventing our Constitution or we don't really have a Constitution." The dissent says, "Oh, come on. I mean, the society has gotten a lot more complicated. The kinds of laws that get passed are not the sorts of things that the courts were worried about back then. We need to evolve with the times in the way our court system operates." A majority of the court prefers to look back to history and what they would call an originalist approach to interpreting the Constitution and the basic laws that implement it.
Well, and you mentioned the District Court, federal district court judges that that ruled against the Biden administration, too. So now, when Trump leaves office, this would, I guess, maybe in some ways even benefit Democrats down the road.
Well, yeah, you can look back in time. And no one's had a chance to do this yet, but let's consider the mifepristone litigation, the abortion medication litigation that's been going on in the Amarillo division of our Northern District of Texas. There about whether the one judge that sits there can effectively set national abortion policy. Well, that's going to be relevant to that case. What about the challenge to Roe versus Wade a few years ago? That was an effort to stop enforcement of that law. Is that something we have to go back and rethink now, that kind of challenge? So there's a lot of extra work. That's a lot of a lot of thinking is going to have to be done to fully implement this. But the big picture has been laid out. We're not going to have any more of these one-shot nationwide injunctions, Republican or Democrat.
Okay. We are still waiting for that decision on the Texas law that's aimed at blocking kids from accessing online pornography. We're hoping to get maybe a decision and then, if we can, an assessment from you as well.