CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig said on Friday that the Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump a major victory by expanding his power to issue executive orders without interference from district courts.
The Court ruled in a 6-3 decision that lower courts exceeded their authority by issuing a nationwide block on Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship for those born to illegal immigrants. Honig said on “The Situation Room” that this ruling “limits” district judges from issuing nationwide injunctions, giving Trump the power to issue more executive orders.
“On the issue of whether district court judges can issue nationwide injunctions, can stop the president’s action nationwide, conservatives have long been skeptical of that power by district court judges,” Honig said. “Generally speaking, conservatives are more proponents of executive power of the president’s power. And generally speaking, liberals have believed in more of the power of an individual district court judge … [the ruling] does appear to be an expansion of the president’s power to issue these orders because it limits district court judges to stop them.” (RELATED: CNN’s Elie Honig Says Courts Cannot ‘Just Second Guess’ Trump If They ‘Disagree’ With His Decisions)
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Reading directly from the decision, Honig explained that district court judges’ injunctions cannot be “broader than necessary,” meaning they have to be “as narrow as possible” so it does not impact people who are not part of a specific case.
“That’s a little bit vague, a little bit broad. But the Supreme Court does that sometimes, they will give a test or a standard and say ‘okay, from now on, you have to apply this test,’” Honig continued. “It ‘cant be broader than necessary,’ and then it’s up to the court to duke it out case by case. So they don’t give us mathematical formulas or scientific equations, it’s frustrating sometimes. But the courts have given us a broad pronouncement basically limiting, to some extent, to what extent we’ll work out in the details, but limiting to some extent the ability of district courts to issue these orders.”
Trump issued the “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship” executive order on his first day in office in January, which ends guaranteed citizenship for children of illegal aliens or migrants on temporary visas. The administration appealed three lower court orders that blocked the birthright citizenship order in April, asking the Supreme Court to deliberate whether district courts have the power to block nationwide policies.
During oral arguments in May, Solicitor General John Saur stated that lower courts issued over 40 nationwide injunctions against Trump since he began his second term. Honig further said that former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden “railed” against universal injunctions handed down by district courts, meaning this ruling impacts the presidency as a whole.
Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who wrote the majority opinion, wrote that the universal injunctions against Trump “likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to federal courts.”
“The injunctions before us today reflect a more recent development: district courts asserting the power to prohibit enforcement of a law or policy against anyone,” Barrett wrote. “These injunctions—known as ‘universal injunctions’—likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to federal courts. We therefore grant the Government’s applications to partially stay the injunctions entered below.”
Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
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