US Supreme Court limits federal judges' power to block Trump orders(theguardian.com) |
US Supreme Court limits federal judges' power to block Trump orders(theguardian.com) |
So, deporting people to a third-country (another decision SCOTUS allowed this term) has a simple balancing test: stay here and be fine or possibly deport a Chinese citizen to El Salvador, which could cause incredible harm. So even ignoring th elikelihood of how the issue is decided, the balancing test favors enjoining third-party deportation.
So in this case, we had a universal injunction against an executive order removing birthright citizenship. This fails on two fronts:
1. As justices noted, it's highly unlikely that the order will be held up as constitutional. There is case law on this. The language of the 14th amendment is clear. The exact issue was discussed at the time. This has no hope in a non-corrupt court of succeeding.
2. Given other decisions, bona fide US citizens could be deported to CECOT and detained indefinitely with no due process. So it should be stayed because of the potential harm.
What SCOTUS did today was say the order revoking birthright citizenship was unlikely to succeed but it allows the administration to proceed anyway while hte issue is litigated in the courts, which could take years.
That's how corrupt this court is.
People have been fed this propaganda that Supreme Court justices are apolitical legal scholars who come down from their tower to issue judgements and keep things in check. It couldn't be further from the truth. Supreme Court justices are political appointees that dress up their political positions in legalese.
Example 1: this court invented the "major questions doctrine" whereby the court decides a matter is large enough that the court gets to override both the administrative and legislative branches.
Example 2: they also invented the "historical traditions doctrine", which is used selectively. For example, abortion was completely legal 200+ years ago. Ben Franklin even published at-home instructions on how to perform an abortion [1].
Example 3: in the wake of the Civil War there was huge violence not from the freed slaves but from white people towards former slaves, most notably with the Colfax massacre. The Supreme Court went on a white supremacist tear during Reconstruction, notably gutting the federal government's ability to prosecute hate crimes like Colfax [2].
Example 4: The Tiney court in the 1850s made what is perhaps one of the worst decisions ever made (ie Dred Scott), arguing from a legal and constitutional perspective that black people weren't "people".
Example 5: the Roberts court decided that moeny equals speech, gutting any legislation around campaign spending, which is a big part of how we got here.
Example 6: the presidential immunity decision will go down in history as one of the 10 or even 5 worst decisions ever made. It completely invented far-reaching immunity that essentially made the president a king, in a country that was founded on the very idea of rejecting monarchs.
Example 7: in 1984, the Supreme Court decided that in any areas of ambiguity in legislation, trial courts should defer to the agency empowered by Congress to enforce that legislation. This is the so-called "Chevron deference".
More than 40 years passed through 7 presidents (4 Republican and 3 Democrat) where both parties at different times controlled Congress. Congress declined to legislate away Chevron deference despite having ample opportunity to do so. Moreso, they intentionally wrote legislation with Chevron deference in mind yet this court decided to reverse Chevron. Yet on other cases, the court has deferred to Congress's inaction as intent.
Fun fact: Chevron v Natural Resources Defense Council was previously known as Natural Resources Defense Council v. Gorsuch [3]. That's not a coincidence. The suit involved Reagan's head of dthe EPA, Anna Gorsuch, mother of current Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch, who was humiliated and ultimately fired from the EPA while trying to destroy it from within.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2022/05/18/1099542962/abortion-ben-frank...
[2]: https://www.theroot.com/what-was-the-colfax-massacre-1790897...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Resources_Defense_Coun...
Banning a nationwide injunction against birthright citizenship is inherently different. It’s a fundamental constitutional right we are talking about. Banning birthright citizenship should not be allowed to be enforced until SCOTIS decides the matter.
Nationwide injunctions were saught and used by (self-proclaimed) conservatives to slow down and stop Biden immigration policies.
With the US Supreme Court strongly tilted toward all four, its an extremely difficult hole to climb out of.
I don't see a dictatorship (anytime soon). Not out of any abundance of optimism, but simply that all four of those constituencies and the Supreme Court's dominant wing itself, are highly aligned with each other, and would all lose out if it goes that far.
So yeah. Do a "water the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants," already. The gun people were more than willing when they thought a Democrat was stealing their votes or Bill Gates was putting microchips in vaccines.
Do you feel that temporary checks (that can be easily reversed) to ensure the government is behaving in a constitutional way are ridiculous?
They don't, they appeal straight up to the 9 judges that they actually have to appease
It causes the least harm to block the birthright executive order until it’s legality can be determined. Therefore it should be blocked nationwide.
They can absolutely still strike down a law or executive branch policy.
This forces judges to actually do their job., instead of a nationwide injunction while they decide if they want to do their job later.
It doesn’t actually alter some fabric of our democracy or checks and balances, because the judges had already gone beyond what the constitution and congress prescribed.
Every issue that any partisan has with this country is because one branch isn’t doing their job.
The disruptive aspect of this - with concern to the birthright case that hasnt been ruled on yet - is just another example of this. Judges not doing their job.
One thing they didn't talk about was structural: the court system is split up into X circuits, and each circuit is independent. Normally each circuit uses rulings from other circuits as a basis for its judgements, but circuits are pretty independent from each other. The Supremes weigh in when the circuits conflicted with each other.
The national injunctions issued by the lower court allowed the lowest level court to have more authority than an appeals court. An appellate court's decision was only binding on its circuit. Why would a lower court have more authority than an appeals court? That makes no sense.
That's outside of all the reasoning the court used to stop this practice.
That said, if an affected individual brought a suit the may be able to get an injunction, since the court ruled that universal injunctions were inappropriate.
An appellate court considers the decisions of the courts below it, so it makes sense its actions would be restricted to those courts. What makes no sense is the newly possible situation in which an action violates the U.S. Constitution in one district but not another.
It is precisely the universality and supremacy of the law which gives the lower courts the authority to make universal rulings. Just because something is federally illegal in one federal district doesn't mean it is legal in another.
The lower court doesn't have more authority than the appellate court if the appellate court can overturn the lower court.
No court has the "authority" to make arbitrary unlawful rulings.
Through what legal avenue?
[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/presidential-documents/execu...
It's impractical to rule on a subject before allowing parties to formulate coherent prepared arguments. Ruling on circumstantial evidence is a temporary stop, leaving the ruling up to an appellate which will invalidate it due to it being founded on circumstantial evidence. The injunctions were the practical way to allows all parties to formulate their case and make a legal reasoning for a ruling. Written law has to be incremental and narrow for interpretation. Otherwise it's an interpretive dance free for all in every case.
You have repeatedly implied that the jobs of Judges are something other than what you they are. Ofc you don't think they are doing what you think they should be. That's inconsequential.
A judge's job is to *judge*. They have basically zero ability to gather evidence, that is the responsibility for the parties to the case.
Would you have them issue a ruling before being presented with evidence? That makes no sense. But at the same time harm can come from not issuing a ruling. Thus we have injunctions--if a judge feels a case is likely to prevail they can issue an injunction prohibiting actions which inflict harm that can't be remedied by the resolution of the case.
What? That makes no sense. You can lookup which court and judge (or panel of judges) issued the injunctions. I do not understand why this non-existent anonymity would motivate a judge to issue an injunction.
> They can still strike down a law or executive branch policy.
Federal courts will only look at cases if there is a party with standing who engages in a lawsuit. If someone is being deported without due process, it will be hard for them to bring suit.
> This forces judges to actually do their job., instead of a nationwide injunction while they decide if they want to do their job later.
In general there are two reasons why these temporary restraining orders which have been issued. The first being that not doing so would cause irrevocable (or ridiculously difficult to revoke) harm (e.g., deporting people to a foreign jail). The second is that the TRO is used to stop something which seems illegal on its face (e.g. deporting people to countries from which they have never been).
> It doesn’t actually alter some fabric of our democracy or checks and balances, because the judges had already gone beyond what the constitution and congress prescribed.
It does alter the power dynamic of our democracy. Now, the executive branch can repeatedly perform illegal acts and only needs to stop its behavior in cases which have been decided. This checks and balances isn’t about stopping each other branch in a vacuum, the intent is to stop the government from overreaching on its citizenry. By crippling all of the lower courts, the Supreme Court has created a bureaucratic bottleneck for itself, allowing the executive branch to effectively DDoS the judicial system with case after case.
> The disruptive aspect of this - with concern to the birthright case that hasnt been ruled on yet - is just another example of this. Judges not doing their job.
No, it was the judge telling the executive branch that the executive branch must recognize the citizenship of children born on US soil. Instead of actually appealing the TRO on grounds of the legality of their actions, the executive branch has decided to complain about the legality of a court telling the executive branch to stop.
Who is supposed to tell the executive branch to stop doing something illegal, congress? Part of the point of the executive branch was to allow for some expedience, congress is slow. A judge is in a perfect position to tell the executive branch to stop, they don’t need to wait on committee and are not beholden to the president. Without the ability, the executive branch can quite literally do whatever the president wants.
And it may be overturned, but judicial decisions are based on law to date. So if either party games it to the detriment of the system, I’d assume it would be overturned.
There are very few ways an armed populace can stop a dictator (and not become an unmitigated disaster for everybody). There are a ton of ways they can start chaos - which can be a great opportunity for wannabe dictators.
And that's not considering the case when these armed citizens want to be the dictator's death squad in the first place.
The strength of an insurgency is in the arms the common people possess, and a weak insurgency means years, decades, even generations of bitter fighting against a despot as they ultimately wait for them to die of old age or in-fighting among the elite and hopefully get someone nicer. I don't think that is an effective or desirable goal, I would rather the issue gets forced quickly. Even if the chance of stability immediately afterwards is lower, I think the ability to mess up despotic ambitions more quickly and decisively makes up for it in being able to do it again rapidly if necessary.
As for people wanting to be part of the death squads, their organizations can be destroyed just as easily as the one they destroyed to gain power. I can assure you that people who want to kill and grift their way to glory and wealth are not the only people armed nor the only ones willing to fight for their values.
Yes, we are sitting on a powder keg, but so is everyone else that want to be king of the powder keg.
- Marbury vs Madison, 1803
The quote is from a landmark case that established the judiciary as being the ultimate arbiters of the interpretation of the laws that have been passed by the legislature and signed by the executive.
That's not new. It's called a circuit split, and generally results in the cases being combined when SCOTUS hears them to sort out the difference.
Absolutely. As it should be.
The problem here is that the SCOTUS decision under discussion here makes it less likely (perhaps quite unlikely) that the SCOTUS will even be asked to "sort out the difference."
That's because their ruling today made it clear that if you're not a named plaintiff in a suit against the government, you are not subject to/protected by any ruling on that case, unless and until, a SCOTUS ruling sorts it out.
And since the prevailing party has no standing to appeal (only the "losing" party -- party as in plaintiff/defendant, not political party), if the Executive Branch doesn't appeal, SCOTUS will never see such cases -- thus leaving the Executive branch to do literally anything with impunity outside the realm of the circuit court involved.
aren't those cases the point of the Supreme Court? when districts conflict it goes to the Supreme Court.
Now the government can choose to "lose" in some places and let the injunction stand. Then, in all other locations in the country, the constitution of the United States is quite literally different in perpetuity.
And it's not even by-locality, sans cases brought by a state government. SCOTUS has defined injunctions as by-litigant. So now two babies born next to each other in the same hospital to visa parents can have different naturalization statuses based on if those parents had sued in the right district court or not.
This makes US law effectively intractable. The only natural resolution then is to visit Obergfell - the gay marriage case that the current SCOTUS majority has harped against for years in their rulings - and resolve the conflict by appealing to the federal nature of the law & enforcement, revoking citizenship of even those with an injunction.
In another comment I've gone into detail on exactly how the federal government can force that case to the SCOTUS.
I'd love to see higher requirements for issuing them, and an expedited appeals process to review them. I'd like to see protections against judge shopping (as endorsed by both Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer: https://www.texastribune.org/2024/04/11/judge-shopping-texas...) We know SCOTUS can move very fast when they feel like it.
You are incorrect.
You are clearly partisan. The GP says nothing about the number, but is instead the impact.
You should also consider normalizing the number of injunctions to the number of executive orders per term.
That paints an even more stark picture for the Trump administration.
Strategically, the government could enact a policy affecting a million people, be sued, lose, provide relief to the named plaintiffs, and then not appeal the decision. The upper courts never get the opportunity to make binding precedent, the lower courts do not get to extend relief to non-plaintiffs, and the government gets to enforce its illegal policies on the vast majority of people who did not (likely could not) sue.
That said, the procedure here is to just use class action lawsuits to get nationwide injunctions. The opinion explicitly notes that it is an option. And today there was a big flurry of people amending their complaints to do just that.
Unfortunately "the set of people who are affected by this law" doesn't define a class.
I recently learned my company’s Handbook has a passage which says I cannot participate in a class action lawsuit against the company. Sure, they can _just say_ I can’t eat green M&Ms, but what’s the twist?
So here's how the loophole works. There are 12 courts of appeals. You (ICE) does a bad thing. (renditions a US citizen to an El Salvador concentration camp without due process) You get sued, appeal it to that court of appeals. Let's say it's the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, let's say you lose. You take the L and move on. You never do the bad thing in the 9th circuit again: that decision is binding. Then you do it again in a different circuit. Let's say you do the bad thing in Texas, where the 9th circuit decision was not binding. Let's say you win this time. Now the 5th circuit is your playground.
From now on, every time you arrest someone in the 9th circuit, you put them on an express flight to anywhere in the 5th district within an hour or so of arresting them, before they can get a lawyer to talk to a judge. The precedent that matters is the 5th circuit precedent, where the detainee is right now, not the 9th district (or anywhere else) where they were detained.
Because the Supreme Court has now ruled that this is a lower court problem, they've effectively blocked anyone from ever getting justice ever again.
"Precedent" can include both binding authority and persuasive authority. Any ruling (and lots of things which aren't rulings, like scholarly treatises), can be persuasive precedent, but trial court decisions are not binding precedent, even in the district of the court that issued them.
Only appellate court decisions are binding precedent, and only (basically) on courts subordinate to court making the decision.
In terms of efficiency, it’s more efficient. Those in favor of universal injunctions are saying there should be hundreds of judges all racing to rule over the government, and to have their opinions control in the abstract as to cases that aren’t even before them.
If the government forces the same issue over and over there are plenty of remedies at hand: 1983 civil penalties against officers, sanctions against attorneys for frivolous arguments, and ultimately the court can hand the legislature everything it needs to impeach and remove a president by ruling that he / she is intentionally failing to enforce the law.
Now we get to see Americans have their legitimacy removed so they can be sent to "Alligator Alcatraz", the new prison being built just for them in the Everglades.
Because it is unlawful. Student loan forgiveness is not an entitlement. College isn’t an entitlement. These are the facts. Moreover, college is a privilege, and it’s a choice, and at its core it is an investment into your future. Having the government forgive it implies the taxpayer will pay for it. That means that essentially people who chose _not_ to go to college, by their own choice or due to their own circumstances, now have to pay for the investments of the people who chose to go. College educated people tend to make much more money too, so in essence you’ll literally be taking money from the less privileged and giving it to the more/rich. And this would be done by force. In what way would that be lawful? Why would others have to pay for your personal investments? You took out a loan, you pay it off. Leave everyone else out of it.
Seems like all one would need is a case where the government won at a lower court, allowing the other party can appeal.
And if they never win, then the issue is more about legal resources than anything else, no?
Right. If the government wants to take a very broad action, it is happy to eat some individual losses here and there. Most people won't be able to sue.
What's the chance that this could be addressed via class action?
Even then, it only affects those in the class. E.g., it wouldn’t stop across the board federal enforcement as unconstitutional. It would take take a better part of a decade for that class action to move forward.
I think you’ll see this playing out very soon.
Justice Sotomayor dissents:
> Instead, the Government says, it should be able to apply the Citizenship Order (whose legality it does not defend) to everyone except the plaintiffs who filed this lawsuit.
If that’s the case, I’m curious if it could be fixed with a class action, so everyone (or everyone born in the US) is a plaintiff? If that’s legally a thing.
"But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist." - Lysander Spooner (emphasis mine)
Resilient systems have to align incentives such that they work whether or not everybody has enough good will or agreeability to play along.
250 years isn't a bad run. Maybe the next Constitution can iterate and fix the incentive alignment.
It’s been ~40 years of Talk Radio in America and ~30 years of TV, which has sold entertainment as news and fine tuned the ability to have a captive voting bloc.
Producing accurate content is laborious, narratives are cheap. Facts are essentially luxury goods, and the left+center is selling them as public goods. This can never work, it takes too much to pay for and maintain the institutions which make this possible.
The right is on the other hand, being organized and “flooding the zone”, in an unending effort to reduce faith in institutions. On top of it, information from the center and left doesn’t get consumed on the right.
This took decades to set up. Today Trump’s approval ratings are down overall, but Republican support for Trump remains at its March number - 88%.
Edit: If I could introduce another metaphor; it’s hard to sell your goods, where half the market is locked behind a monopoly that cuts corners, and sells junk food but can label it as health food. Oh, and they spend their profits, accusing health food of being spurious.
Either you can have watchers all the way down and nothing gets done, or there are limits.
If you accept that framing, you accept many of that frames implications without even consciously processing them. This is one of the ways that consent is manufactured.
This ruling is stating that federal judges cannot rule that the law is blocking Trump. By accepting and adopting the frame that it is Trump vs Judges you implicitly accept that the law itself is a weapon rather than a boundary. It argues that the law is subjective, based on the judge ruling, rather than objective. It argues that there is no objective truth. To say it is judges and not the law that stops trump is to say that judges are agents of themselves and not agents of the law.
Agreeing that it is Judges vs Trump is implicitly agreeing that the law is arbitrary based on the judge ruling. Arbitrary government is authoritarian government.
The court’s decision to permit the executive to violate the constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law,” Jackson wrote. “Given the critical role of the judiciary in maintaining the rule of law … it is odd, to say the least, that the court would grant the executive’s wish to be freed from the constraints of law by prohibiting district courts from ordering complete compliance with the constitution.
This feels about as grim as the Citizens United dissent, which has been proven more and more true every day:
A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold.
I'm not particularly happy about nationwide injunctions, but this is much worse if you have a president who is not shy to "break the law now and fight it in court later". And now that Trump has shown the way, you can be sure future presidents will follow.
Another terrible outcome is that you then have federal orders applied differently from state to state (or more accurately, federal district to district). If you're in Nevada you won't get citizenship, but in Oregon you will.
This is right up there with the Presidential Immunity in terms of terrible decisions by this SCOTUS.
They're 100% coming for Obergfell and it's clear now how. They'll arrest a legal US citizen who has naturalized citizenship from illegal parents, born in a state that received an injunction but residing in a state that has not.
The representative of that person will say that they by being a citizen in the other state, they must be respected as a citizen in the other. They will cite Obergfell.
The SCOTUS will revoke their ruling on Obergfell and say, no, you are not a citizen just because there's an injunction in that other state.
The astute reader may notice that this is literally a replay of Dread Scott.
Every federal judicial district (that's one per state in smaller states, but more in larger states—California has four.)
North and South?
1. File a suit in every circuit
2. Request an injunction type that's more appropriate
Given the number of babies being born every day it shouldn't be hard to do.
The thing is, the US doesn't issue citizenship papers. So I suppose they need to apply for an SSN and get denied (since the baby is a non-citizen), which will show immediate harm.
It also begs the question: if that baby is illegal can it be deported?
The thing here is that instead of officially denying it, the administration will just "coincidentally" slow-walk everything indefinitely, then illegally exile the baby to Sudan when ICE notices they don't have proof of citizenship.
"No right is safe in the new legal regime the court creates. Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law-abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship. The majority holds that, absent cumbersome class-action litigation, courts cannot completely enjoin even such plainly unlawful policies unless doing so is necessary to afford the formal parties complete relief. That holding renders constitutional guarantees meaningful in name only for any individuals who are not parties to a lawsuit. Because I will not be complicit in so grave an attack on our system of law, I dissent."
Guess now not everyone has the same rights in America.
They can treat you how they wish unless you personally take it up. What next, personalised constitutions? rules for thee and not for me.
"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. (https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.htm)
It seems like it was ruled that instead of 1000, much more local, people able to protect constitutional rule with the force of the judiciary, we now have 9.
If you analyze only based on power changes, now fewer people have more power.
You are secretly calm because you think it won't affect you.. until it does.
This ruling is idiotic even if you are generally opposed to nationwide injunctions. Birthright citizenship is a fundamental and clear cut right. Any attempts to overturn that must meet a high burden of justification. Temporarily suspending such attempts until the matter can firmly be decided causes the least amount of harm and should be allowed.
That's pre-2025 thinking. Now, in 2025, there are no clear cut rights, other than, maybe, gun ownership.
Oh but the high court of chancery in england! They didn't have them, so we can't either! Never mind that is 2025, we're a different nation, the federal government has a lot more power, and we have these injunctions for all of Biden's term and they had plenty of opportunity to stop them but said nothing when it was for protecting gun rights or denying women's healthcare.
The US has a three-tiered judiciary that moves slowly, Congress has a very high threshold for impeachment and removal (and a slow process), and the order of succession is basically locked in for four years. The people are not easily moved to action, and it's doubtful how much they could realistically accomplish.
Universal injunctions were a Band-Aid fix, one of the very few avenues our system permitted for there to be any rapid institutional response to illegal and immediately harmful policy. But that is no more.
As an exercise, what happens if a president issues a "throw enemies in the woodchipper" executive order? How many hours or days would it take the other branches of government to legally nullify the order? (What they can do in practice is another question.)
It's an extreme example, but a future admin could use the current admin's reasoning to unilaterally confiscate guns and force you to be a plaintiff in federal court to get relief.
That's why the Feds were moving high-profile detainees to Louisiana as quickly as possible; for a more friendly judicial setup.
https://www.axios.com/2025/03/27/trump-immigration-louisiana...
This is all a joke anyway. There’s no real rule of law. This is a game to extract more power.
But yeah, ever since the Supreme Court blessed those provisions in National Labor Relations Board v. Murphy Oil USA, Inc (2018), companies have been adding them to employee agreements.
I read the Wikipedia article [0] and I would point out that a class defined by birth place would pass easily Scalia's test for commonality. So it seems that using a class action suit that includes every person born in US of un-documented parents would work. (But who knows what other tests the Supreme Court would come up now...)
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wal-Mart_Stores,_Inc._v._Dukes
> There is a serious question, moreover, whether this Court will ever get the chance to rule on the constitutionality of a policy like the Citizenship Order. Contra, ante, at 6 (opinion of KAVANAUGH, J.) (“[T]he losing parties in the courts of appeals will regularly come to this Court in matters involving major new federal statutes and executive actions”). In the ordinary course, parties who prevail in the lower courts generally cannot seek review from this Court, likely leaving it up to the Government’s discretion whether a petition will be filed here. These cases prove the point: Every court to consider the Citizenship Order’s merits has found that it is unconstitutional in preliminary rulings. Because respondents prevailed on the merits and received universal injunctions, they have no reason to file an appeal. The Government has no incentive to file a petition here either, because the outcome of such an appeal would be preordained. The Government recognizes as much, which is why its emergency applications challenged only the scope of the preliminary injunctions
Indeed, this is one of the concerns of the dissenting opinions.
The Universal Injunctions were a one-way rule. If the government lost any one case, the injunction would apply against the government in every other instance. However, if the government won, only that one person would be deported and the opposition would be free to try the same argument again with any of the other judges.
Christ almighty. This is why we can't have nice things.
What you describe is voting
We’re in this mess because people are not interested enough, educated enough, or engaged enough politically to make their position explicit to drive the direction of legislation and executive action.
Citizens of The United States have every tool available to to work together to shape their communities. The reality is the overwhelming majority do not do that, and you can come up with a lot of reasons why, which are structural in many cases, but the fact remains that the majority of people are not involved in the political process at all, have no desire to be an actively reject any opportunity to be.
Assuming that citizens would all of a sudden become involved because it requires a lawsuit, means that there’s the capacity to do so, which does not exist, and all we need is a catalyst.
If the number of possible catalysts that have already happened in the last decade we’re not sufficient then nothing short of a literal terminator Skynet scenario is going to cause people to take action and I’m increasingly doubtful that even that would do it.
Based on my observation from my work position, people are ready to just roll over onto their backs and have robots slice them from the belly up, because it’s easier than actually doing something that would prevent it.
“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba
And they actively vote against the will of their constituents 35% of the time. http://promarket.org/2017/06/16/study-politicians-vote-will-...
Remember, force is out of the question because it will provide justification for the oppression and make people more willing to accept it.
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/26/nx-s1-5447450/trump-2024-elec...
The problem is that Dems are just culturally irrelevant. Most people don't care about issues, policy or the economy, they just want to cheer for a team and will justify everything their team does regardless of efficacy or outcome. Trump is the fun underdog team that everyone is talking about, the Dems are the boring party-pooper team we all love to hate. During covid, that boring became a source of needed stability, but after boring stewarded us through the crisis, nobody wanted to be associated with them again.
You can’t shape your community to overcome the power of the federal government.
As for interpretation: of course it is subjective. That's literally what they do in cases of federal and constitutional law: statutory interpretation. There's even named schools of thought for how it should be done, purposivism and textualism. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/statutory_interpretation
Is the constitution more protected or less protected?
Will trump have a harder time breaking the law or an easier time?
Many in this thread arguing about the legal minutiae of a system that only became problematic in the context of an anti-constitution anti-law president... and I just don't understand. I don't understand what reality you're living in where this is something to defend.
The famous quote “give me the man and I will give you the case against him.” Comes to mind. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Give_me_the_man_and_I_will_g...
Legal settings (at least in the US), have always favored the wealthy who can find an army of lawyers to find loopholes.
I don’t agree with this, and hopefully what is currently happening raises awareness.
For example, the Patriot act post-9/11 famously gave law enforcement unconstitutional powers within 100 miles of a national border (I could be off, but this is how I remember it). If you really want to split hairs, the US has a LOT of borders if you include international airports.
It would be more accurate to say that prior to this ruling, any of 700 district judges could unilaterally block the president from exceeding his authority under the constitution pending a review, including matters of national security, based on their own subjective view of the law. It may differ in other countries, but under the US Constitution, the judicial branch ultimately decides the limits of executive authority, not the President.
If it's truly a matter of national security, the President could always file emergency appeal and it would almost certainly be granted. If it's such a dire and immediate emergency that even those few hours were critical, it's doubtful that any President would feel obligated to obey the injunction anyway.
Far from preventing the proper functioning of government, this was one of the few remaining guardrails maintaining the proper functioning of government under unprecedented circumstances.
So either a judge can block orders that exceed the president's authority and orders that are within it, or the judge can block neither.
Not at all. Whether or not the president is exceeding their authority, a judge could block it nationally. It's not like lower court rulings haven't been overturned before.
And the bigger issue is "judge shopping". Want to block something nationally? Just find 1 of 700 judges who will rule the way you want, and file in that district.
Enjoy the chaos though, because some later administration as a revenge will very likely strip the rights of folks who can't show a naturalization certificate in the same way.
"Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."
Note the "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof". Trump's argument is that people born in America to tourist parents here for a few weeks (for example) aren't subject to the jurisdiction of America. It's a valid argument to make, even if you come down on a different side. Even the author of the 14th amendment said that was the point of that clause. Even in logical terms it makes sense: You can't just let anyone in to give birth and then collect benefits; it's unsustainable.
However, this case wasn't about citizenship. It was about the broader issue of lower courts issuing restraining orders outside their jurisdictions. It's a recipe for chaos. There's a reason why there are multiple jurisdictions, and courts are limited to their jurisdictions. What happens when two lower courts issue conflicting nationwide orders? The only court in the US that has jurisdiction over the entire country is the Supreme Court. This was a losing battle.
There's a right way and a wrong way to go about addressing problems. Court cases are sometimes more about the core issues involved than the concrete circumstances. Sure, birthright citizenship was the reason for the suit, but the core issue was judicial overreach. Don't get mad because the way your side was "winning" was by cheating, and they were stopped. Try having an actual good argument, and doing things the right way by arguing the actual case in a court.
1. The executive is doing something illegal to hundreds of thousands of people.
2. Dozens and hundreds of people sue them.
3. The executive loses in court.
4. The executive does not appeal to the supreme court the cases it lost.
5. Thus, no binding precedent that stops the illegal action in #1 is set.
This is actual lawless lunacy, and this enshrines it as SOP going forward. Is this the country you want to live in? Do you think this is how it should run?
Here's a wild idea. If the executive disagrees with the federal courts on the merits of whether or not its decisions are illegal, it can appeal up to SCOTUS, and win a case on its merits. It can't do that because even under this SCOTUS, their case has no merits.
> exercising his authority under the constitution pending a review
That is the entire bloody point of checks and balances. You are cheer-leading the complete destruction of them. The government, when challenged on the legality of what its doing, needs to win their case in court, because the courts are the final arbiters of written law.
Yes, this has been going on for decades at various levels of government.
It's very common when it comes to gun rights. The government (local/state and federal) will frequently avoid appealing if they think they might then lose the case, setting a wide precedent for millions of people.
Nationwide injunctions were never clearly authorized by statute, and letting any one of 700 district judges block a federal policy everywhere created chaos and forum shopping.
If a policy is truly unconstitutional, the proper path is a class action or taking it up to the Supreme Court
Not giving individual judges a veto over national law.
(I think there's a MUCH stronger argument to be made that the proper function of the US government has been broken by Presidents changing thing by executive order because nobody has enough votes to do much in the Senate. It seems like "nobody has the votes to make big changes" should be an indicator that not making big changes is the proper result.)
The status quo would be "issue a ruling, it may or may not get put on hold while the government appeals, eventually it gets to the Supreme Court if necessary." Seemed to be working. Republicans obviously have used this to challenge stuff themselves.
It is unclear why there is a need for giving the government an escape hatch to let them say "sure, we lost this one case, we'll stop enforcing things against these few people, we just won't appeal and will continue to do whatever we want nationally instead."
"Nobody has the votes" seems like a weird way to put it, because is implies that everyone wants to make changes, they just can't agree which changes to make. On the contrary, I think the issue is that most congresspeople do not want to make changes. Changes are scary. If your name is associated with a change, and that change becomes unpopular, it might threaten your reelection!
So it reads to me like we've ended up in a similar spot, but with the requirement that an insane amount of paperwork happens.
What this means is that it’s now ok for the orange man to break the law. Rule of law will only be upheld in very limited circumstances in very limited areas.
In the meantime, when I sue John Doe and get an injunction, they are enjoined from their conduct everywhere; but when I sue the government, it should only apply to me? Makes no sense.
IANAL but I read SCOTUS opinions regularly and this one is hard to argue with. If things should be different then we need legislative/constitutional changes.
lol, yes, like birthright citizenship written plainly into the constitution.
What good are your further legislative/constitutional changes worth if the executive can just ignore them except for the single individuals who file suit?
This is a ruling which chooses order over law. Order without justice is tyranny.
You mean like under their own judgement?
This is why we should have small government. If the government has a narrowly scoped role, the fear of the other side getting elected goes away. With huge government comes great concern about who’s in it.
As proof of that principle, how many people are really fired up about who is elected locally? How about nationally? The reason is the federal government has way too much power.
District courts do not create precedent. Precedent comes from appellate courts.
This ruling does not "restore" a functioning balance, it damages it. This has never been a problem in the past because previous administrations (regardless of politics) didn't take illegal actions daily. Framing it as "politics" is disingenuous as many of the judges ruling against Trump were appointed by him.
The system was working as intended to check an executive acting outside of the law, but once again, the supreme court continues to empower the executive.
Constitution would have to be changed
In theory it's just an injunction, but the reality is this kind of stuff takes forever to get hashed out in the courts, and Trump will be well out of office before it gets settled.
I have no problem with SCOTUS injunctions, but there are too many district courts for this to work.
The way things were heading the president was going to be forced to start ignoring injunctions, and he would have been right to do so. The Roberts court had to make this ruling for the government to function.
Except that it's been working just fine that way since before I was born, so, empirically, you're wrong.
> the president was going to be forced to start ignoring injunctions [...] The Roberts court had to make this ruling for the government to function.
So basically you're saying their way to legitimize Trump ignoring court orders is to de-legitimize an entire type of court order that has been commonplace and accepted for 50 years.
This sounds like "we'll change the law so Trump doesn't have to break it". Authoritarianism it is, then, I guess.
For the government to rule by executive order.
For the government to be able to change with the winds of Trump's opinion.
Neither of which is "functioning correctly" by my definition.
No, they will not. Remember when Breonna Taylor was summarily executed for Kenneth Walker exercising his second amendment right to night time home defense - one of the exact scenarios the gun-fundamentalists are always fantasizing about - but then the Trumpists came out on the side of licking the jackboots?
Personally, I think it is likely that sometime during this Trump "presidency" we will see him call for more national gun control (obviously framed in terms of hurting some vulnerable group). We will see most of his supporters fall right in line, just as they have been doing on everything else. There will be heaps of rationalization about how it won't affect them of course, and they might even be right.
Morals, values, and other lofty ideals mean nothing to these people, beyond being trotted out as dishonest justifications to try and trick reasonable people into supporting their movement. I'm sure they meant something at some point, but that has been long forgotten. Their only real desire appears to be unrestrained power for their team, demonstrating it by hurting people who aren't on their team. This is why it has been impossible to have an actual discussion about what they actually want, or how Dear Leader and his policies fail at everything they claim to want - there is literally nothing of substance there.
I could extend some merit to the idea that injunctions should be limited in complex cases where case law is thin and the law is less than clear. When executive orders are clearly unconstitutional, however, I do not then see any reason for limits.
The law that states that growing wheat on your own land is interstate commerce.
My reading is that under the previous system, a single district could prevent an order federally, even if every other district judge agreed with the new order.
I don't see why a single district should be able to influence the entire country. I would understand that they could limit powers in their district, and potentially challenge laws at a state level, and then federally.
Let's look at how this could have impacted a topic that gets my attention in the US, gun laws.
I'm definitely left, so let's say a president came in and made some order about changing gun laws and made it harder to get a gun.
It seems to me, that if that were to occur, a single judge in a gun-loving district could block the order universally for all the other states?
That doesn't seem right. It does make sense that they could say that law doesn't apply to our district, and we will challenge that law being applied to our state and if the state agrees, they could then challenge the law federally.
I'm obviously making up a ton of stuff about a system that I don't understand.
Should a single person be able to pull a fire alarm? Or do we need building-wide consensus first?
In the USA, some judges are elected, hearings can be televised, fragmented laws nationwide, court filings often public.
In UK the opening of the judicial year happens in a church service (i.e. biblical punishment is common), many judges are freemasons,court filings not public, courts control what gets to media, the court below supreme court can, and routinely do, block cases from getting to supreme court. And More. In short UK judiciary is institutionally corrupt with the elected and unelected the one and the same but press won't say it.
1) There is no written constitution, the supreme court in the UK is only there to interpret existing laws as written not to interpret differences between "tiers" of law
2) The UK has a system that can pass new laws, generally by simple majority so any decision rendered about existing law can be made obsolete generally fairly quickly (In contrast to the current intransigence of the current US system where it is hard to pass primary legislation and virtually impossible to modify the constitution)
3) the court was only established in 2009, and evidently we haven't done much to empower it
A better comparison country might be places like Canada or Australia who do have a written (and harder to modify) constitution.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/democracy...
They tried to steal an election four years ago by sabotaging the vote certification.
Remember: federal power is delegated from the states, not the other way around.
At the top of the Articles, it's pretty clear that the delegates of the states have come together to establish a league of states. At the top of the Constitution, it's explicitly stated that "We the People […] do ordain and establish."
The descent to authoritarianism usually begins with a party gaining enough power that it can override the checks and balances. Which often involves rewriting the constitution.
The US system has power more fragmented than most. In Europe, the Senate often doesn't wield any power (it rubber stamps anything the legislature approves). The executive is a part of the legislative.
In parliamentary system, individual MPs are "whipped" into voting with the party, and can basically be pushed out of power if they don't go along with it. If the party in power has a large majority, there is nothing but the courts to stop them from passing whatever they want.
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
> There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
> There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.
Can you explain this statement in greater detail?
Lets not forget the ACLU has burnt 100 years of goodwill to become the bad guys in the past decade.
They went from from amazing freedom fighters to lets hope their organization gets destroyed because of the awful humans they let in internally in recent times. I understand there is a split with an old guard still fighting to get it back, but they will lose.
> "the cruelty is the point" read that EO
Helps if you link it - https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/defe...
The second claim is their handling of covid. And the thing is this is an interesting case study for the ACLU. One of the things that people expect from organizations is devotion to a set of principles, and that the organization will die on any hill involving them. And Covid was a situation in which they had to ask themselves whether or not dying on their hill was the right thing to do even if they were wrong. Not wrong in sense that they are defending the "bad people," they do that all the time, but that this is a situation that is genuinely exceptional and that the health and safety of the nation is more important than people's individual civil liberties. And if you turn up the severity of the pandemic I personally think it is fairly obvious that this would be the right choice. It's a hard thing to look at ideals that you have dedicated your life and career to and weigh them against people's lives. Where the controversy lies is how severe you think covid was and whether that severity crossed the threshold. And if you didn't the ACLU's actions look like an arbitrary betrayal of their core principles.
I just don't understand how you expect this to work unless the point is to make the judiciary branch entirely pointless (for government level check and balances).
What are they supposed to do in your theoretical setup? Pass the law again? Add “we really mean it this time” to the end?
Truly, fascism and autocracy are more efficient than checks and balances; not everything must be made “efficient”.
Do we chastise an oak or redwood for taking its time?
https://www.caed.uscourts.gov/caednew/index.cfm/cmecf-e-fili...
https://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/about-federal-...
That is one of the main roles of the Supreme Court: resolving circuit splits.
The 9th has nothing to do with an immigration hearing in the 5th, the individual’s personal history is irrelevant here.
Matter of Rahman, 20 I&N Dec. 480 (BIA 1992) seems to cover this. (IANAL)
A circuit split on an issue is one of the factors that traditionally weighs in favor of the Supreme Court hearing it, in the interests of uniformity of the law.
If the Supreme Court likes the 5th Circuit rule, they take the case it make it the rule, period.
This is not guaranteed.
They don't have to take up a circuit split. They could just… leave it. Several are unresolved as we speak; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_split#Examples_of_exis...
Which leaves the Fifth Circuit a permanent loophole.
No, district court decisions are not binding precedent, not even in the district.
That is indeed a big issue.
My list starts with:
-fund basic research in science and engineering -fund nascent beneficial commercial efforts where private interests fear to tread - supply infrastructure and services that are useful to most but are natural monopolies are network effects monopolies. (i.e. roads, rail,air, healthcare, research labs, weather services to name a few) - punishing cheating. i.e. fraud, externalities such as pollution, shifting costs onto the public to enhance profitability, and all forms of financial engineering. - protection against catastrophic loss - protection of vulnerable people - limiting corporations and individuals from gaining society distorting power.
Except that's a popular myth of the DOGE chainsaw crowd. The US is half the size of nearly every other advanced economy as % of GDP.
I am legitimizing Trump ignoring national preliminary injunctions by district court judges, yes. These judges have broken the system.
Furthermore, I think it's bad to continue calling this movement "conservative", as it helps disguise their aims as business-as-usual rather than the sea change towards destruction of the American experiment. At best they used to be conservative. Then they got angry that the leaders they would choose kept selling them out and that fundamentalism didn't produce effective results, so they gave up on their constructive values and fell into blind team allegiance. Now they're just reactionary/autocratic/authoritarian/fascist.
Secondly, something that is lawful does not need to be an entitlement. If a president can declare an air strike, costing hundreds of millions of dollars -- which I may not consent to as a taxpayer -- then he can forgive loans. The argument that the federal judge in Texas made regarding student loan forgiveness not applying to everyone could be made to PPP loan forgiveness for businesses. (I have a business but didn't receive free money.)
I guarantee somebody else has paid for something they haven't used that you have. We're a society. Part of that is sharing costs. Big reason so much is so fucked up right now is because we're doing a bad job of it.
Here's a good start. Don't have people who don't make the choice to take out loans be forced to pay off those loans. I don't think it's unreasonable that you bear the costs of your _personal_ investments for your _personal_ future. Whether or not society as a whole benefits from it is besides the point. They are _personal_ investments at their core, and they can be paid off with your higher future income. Borrow against your future, not mine. Society's part is contributing to your higher income through business at each individuals' personal discretion. Don't make the mistake thinking anybody owes you anything more. You're not entitle to a higher income even if you went to college. When you made a bad investment, you pay for it. I'm not paying for your lesbian dance theory degree, and neither is the plumber making a living without some degree.
My questions are related to get you to realize there are things you probably use every day funded through taxes, that there are members of society that don't use those things or benefit from them but still pay for them.
People shouldn't be bound to debt because the second they legally turn 18 they get roped into financial matters they absolutely don't have the experience to fully comprehend. Nor are they fortune tellers that can tell if the in demand degree they are starting now will be still be in 4 years. Other debt can be discharged through bankruptcy. Yet, not student loans. Why are other bad investments treated differently?
Not everyone graduates high school either, yet we bare the costs of the personal investments of everyone that does. Education is both personal and an investment in society.
There are already amnesty programs for teachers, social workers, etc. The solution to bail out individuals for their investments is not good policy.
By the time my loans were discharged, I had fully paid the principal and was treading water on interest. Because I paid the minimums, the interest itself had risen to above the cost of the original loans based on those high interest rates I consolidated with. I would call it predatory, and as far as I'm concerned, my debt between me and the Federal government is paid for by me. Nelnet be damned.
We, as a society, need doctors, lawyers, scientists, and engineers. College is a requirement for that.
In cases of emergencies government can and often does intervene (see housing crisis, airlines during covid etc). Why wouldn't government offset something like this in case of student loans during emergencies?
In the end this was a statue (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_Education_Relief_Opport...) Biden was using for loan forgiveness. According to current Supreme Court (at least when Trump is a president) court shouldn't be deciding (in a lot of cases) over executive when its assessment of a situation is correct. However the court did it with Biden.
You're framing it like it's black and white and it's obvious loan forgiveness is wrong/illegal. Nah, it's not obvious, we did have an emergency and it might have needed exceptional solutions to it (in this case with student loans).
Moreover, there is literally no mechanism to prove that your parents are citizens.
Millions of citizens will be at the whim of whatever racist thug decides to hurt them that day.
Welcome to Fascist America.
Greenland, Finland, Norway and Sweden all have no concept of Jus Soli and as far as I know, kids born to non-residents aren't being deported from the hospital.
>Moreover, there is literally no mechanism to prove that your parents are citizens.
I would think a birth certificate would work....
You'd probably be wrong.
> Still, Immigration and Customs Enforcement kept Watson imprisoned as a deportable alien for nearly 3 1/2 years… Watson was correct all along: He was a U.S. citizen.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/01/540903038...
Bonus: They held him long enough the statute of limitations to sue expired.
> On Monday, an appeals court ruled that Watson, now 32, is not eligible for any of that money — because while his case is "disturbing," the statute of limitations actually expired while he was still in ICE custody without a lawyer.
Even a passport isn't enough:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/hamedaleaziz/us-born-ma...
> A US-born Marine veteran who served in Afghanistan had his US passport, a REAL ID driver’s license, a military ID card, and his US Marine Corps dog tags with him when he was arrested by police in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which held him for three days before his lawyer demanded his release, according to the ACLU of Michigan.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-ice-detained-c...
> In her study, she found that, on average, U.S. citizens detained by ICE spent 180 days behind bars.
Without birthright citizenship, a birth certificate no longer implies citizenship.
Many Americans have no birth certificate. My mother, for example.
Remember when the whole entirety of the US right-wing lost their goddamned minds for a year or so re: a sitting president's birth certificate?
> There is also the damage done by the Supreme Court ending the Voting Rights Act
> Kamalah would have won by a landslide
and aside from some bread-crumbs like paid leave, she was very silent in economic issues that affected many minorities...
her campaign was in la-la land [1]
[0] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/kama...
[1] https://readsludge.com/2024/11/18/the-corporate-consultants-...
[0] https://www.as-coa.org/articles/how-latinos-voted-2024-us-pr... [1] https://www.voanews.com/a/in-historic-shift-american-muslim-... [2] https://www.npr.org/2025/03/03/nx-s1-5249686/arab-muslim-vot... [3] https://thewash.org/2024/11/07/arab-american-voters-shift-to...
If you want the US to be a loose confederation of 50 sovereign nations, fine. Just hope you live in California, New York or Texas, because every other state is going to devolve into the American equivalent of Eastern Europe.
With ref to your point 1 and 2 , they are not needed. HRA 1998 covers that.
Point 3 - the supreme court was previously within the House of Lords and the one day they got their own building.
The primary and secondary legislation, and leading case law is fine in the UK. Its just that the Judges know what are really there for and routinely falsify the outcomes.
No one sees the case files, no one sees the transcript, only the judges judgement is published and that we all have to pretend is never anything other than perfect...
I run a non profit trying to change this, can talk about it for hours. Volunteers welcome!
There's no such thing as "courts overstep" in our system. The courts are the final word on things in the US. By definition, they cannot overstep. You or I can disagree with their rulings, but they have the force of law, unless overturned by a higher court.
Bear in mind that this was a case where the multiple courts who considered the issue were unanimous in their opinion that the President was very likely to lose on the merits. Exactly the kind of case where there should be an injunction.
Since when did we start arguing that executive power must be unchecked for fear of it being slightly inconvenienced?
Donald Trump received only 49.8% of votes in the 2024 United States presidential election.
This is what the American people voted for.
Hacker news has become a much more depressing place post-Covid. Musk, Zuck, the All-In guys, Bezos, Altman. All of them role models for the people here, and all of them have gone mask-off to one degree or another in their pursuit of power and wealth and public adulation.
One side of the hacker/startup coin is "look at how I [built this company|escalated privilege|retired early] by [twisting the rules of the system|exploiting a loophole|penetration testing]", and that ethos isn't entirely that far away from "did you know you can get the laws changed just by spending $50k on a senator?" or "Twitter only needs 50 engineers as long as they're all H1-B hostages".
It really feels like what we've lost is empathy and humanity.
Neither can states, either practically or legally.
This is a whole-sale shredding of the constitution.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/10/us/politics/donald-trump-...
People across the political spectrum have an obscene amount of faith in "can't happen here" beliefs being an actual impediment to authoritarianism.
[0]: https://davidson.house.gov/2025/5/rep-warren-davidson-introd...
We have seen what you get when you have an armed populace. Highly armed cops. Highly armed federal agents. Military equipment for civilian forces. All necessary in order to compete in the arms race against the "bad guys." All cheered for by conservatives, of course!
All that make it that much more easy to start cracking down. Maybe as a first step, issuing pardons for the rebels on your side while increasing the use of force against those protesting you.
Guns are not defensive tools. If you have a gun, but the government shoots first, you still lose.
A prime example of this is the immigration system. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi... (“On the Ballot: An Immigration System Most Americans Never Wanted”). Americans never asked to import tens of millions of people from the third world. When Congress reformed the immigration system in 1965, they promised that wouldn’t happen. But for decades, there’s been a coalition of pro-foreigner liberals and pro-cheap-labor conservatives that have facilitated massive immigration that average americans never asked for.
Trump, ironically, is a reaction to the very thing the Princeton study identified.
The case when everyone agrees doesn’t tell you anything. It’s only when people disagree that you can find who has actual power and in this case the general public has effectively zero actual meaningful power day to day.
Systematic voter suppression plus gerrymandering etc may win you rigged elections, but ultimately voting isn’t about the system in place it’s avoidance unrest. We’re entering uncharted territory with how strongly people disagree with what the government is doing, which is where the general public actually has a say, namely by destroying the existing power structures rather than voting. It’s not even a question of insurrection, not having kids plus 60’s style dropping out at scale is ruinous.
1) General labor strike
2) General rent/bill strike
Either one results in an immediate liquidity crisis/credit crunch and the delegitimizing/insolvency of most institutions. The beginning of the COVID pandemic was, essentially, this.
I would add in "general bank run", but I imagine that they just... wouldn't let that happen. Ironically, an emergency "injunction" against withdrawals.
“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
If I become biased or incompetent at my job I’m eventually get fired but do judges ever?
Each Executive administration since W has reached further and further. Congress has ceded more and more, because while it is their responsibility to choose, doing so comes at a political cost they don't want to pay. So they hand it over to the Executive.
Time for some garbage collection in the law code. If you want a limited Executive, vote for a Congress that will take its power back. The Constitution gave tariff power to Congress, for example, and a few decades ago, they gave it over to the President. IIRC, the same goes for border policy and deportation rules. We keep assuming when we install all of this machinery in the Oval Office that no... no he wouldn't push that button, it would be indecent. Every President pushes more of the buttons at their disposal (with the possible exception of Joe, as it was his staff running things and not him), and this one is no exception.
In practice it absolutely does, because now everyone is scrambling to try and protect their clients that were previously covered by the larger injunction. The supreme court could have just not taken the case in the first place, or let the injunctions stand as an appropriate use of injunctions (for grossly unconstitutional executive orders)
Guess what: You're living in the world of bigger problems.
The lesbian dance theory degree example is obviously an analogy to illustrate a bad investment and get you to understand the outrage of having to pay for someone else’s personal (bad) investments. 18 year olds are legally adults in the US and as adults they have the right to make decisions about their futures. But their inexperience does not absolve them of their responsibilities. And it’s not like they have to get a degree fresh out of high school either. They can choose to wait and watch the real world for a few years until they decide what they want to do with their lives. Stop infantilizing them.
If you’re asking me my opinion on discharging debts, I disagree with the concept in principle for the same reason as the original occupy wall street protesters. Businesses that fail, even if they are big, should not be bailed out at the taxpayers expense. Bad investments should fail; that is the risk you wager when you agreed to play that game. You don’t get to turn around and privatize the gains and socialize the losses. We live in a society.
Because it is unconstitutional, and because it is unlawful. It is during times of emergencies that individual liberties are under the greatest threat and so it is during those times they need the strongest protections.
I find it funny you cite the housing crisis and covid as paragons because the government intervention to each of those were horrible and people in general would be much better off in the long run if the government never intervened. Maybe you don't like the idea that the government can be a threat, but I assure you that governments can and do go rogue. Never forget that the constitution was written as a document to put limits on the government. There is an important reason for framing it exactly like that. It puts into focus the very real dangers of having a centralized power encroaching in on every aspect of your life. With every piece it seizes, it also seizes a piece of your individual autonomy.
A party with a majority in power has little to stop any legislation the party decides to pass.
The senate is mostly a rubber stamp. The courts are independent but won’t nullify legislation unless it violates the charter.
MPs can’t not vote with the party unless they want to risk their political career (or it’s a free vote - but that’s reserved for unimportant legislation.
The ruling party can pass whatever the heck they want without much concern.
There's only one court that has the authority to issue nationwide injunctions, and that's the Supreme Court.
Do you mean to say we can have a functional judiciary with only a supreme Court to rule on everything?
The split in Congress is driven by the split in the people and the people DO want actions taken. Just - different actions for each faction.
If there was only one fairly unified party of voters in the country and a Congressman was refusing to vote to do what the voters wanted them to do, they'd get voted out.
"Not doing anything to be careful" is a bug enabled by the population being split.
A certain amount of less-partisan stuff does get passed all the time. But, to get more subtle about it, I think the danger if you help pass something like consumer protection - even if MOST people on both sides would support it - isn't that you risk getting branded with it if it backfires. It's that you get labeled soft in a way that the die-hards who dominate primaries can be rallied against. The right wing has been VERY aggressive in pushing purity tests for decades, and eventually you have convinced everyone of the final-battle-of-good-and-evil stakes. The left has been doing it more and more too, sadly - but it's not like what they were doing before was working too great.
That situation also gives increasing sway to the rich lobbyists who also want to make sure those basic things don't happen. Your base won't get mad at you for failing to ban abortions nationally because obviously you can't. So they don't put much blame on you for not getting the smaller stuff done either, or scrutinize your donors too much.
A single person absolutely can and should pull the fire alarm!
Are you suggesting that an entire country should operate as a single building?
Different districts have different laws and by-laws, and a district judge SHOULD be able to take issue with any law being passed down from on high. But should one person be able to challenge and essentially negate the power of the President.
Remember, I'm trying to take how this would be viewed if it were not a Trump issue. It's really easy to say "oh it's Trump, so screw him!"
I'm just surprised that this is how the system works. A single judge can bring the entire system to a stand-still? Is that really how this works?
This isn't a single person pulling a fire alarm. The alarm has been pulled, it's a single person saying "turn that damn thing off, I don't agree with your fire".
Under normal circumstances, the president wouldn't be shooting the country in the foot, so I completely agree that in this instance, perhaps it is good that a district judge can do this. But if American politics starts getting played this way, I think you may see significantly more challenges in getting good laws passed. I am not saying this is a good law.
Except it's not "getting" played this way. It's been this way for a long, long time.
What you're missing is that Federal district and appeals courts are not the final say. They can make (and do so all the time -- and have done so without issue for a very long time) rulings that are in conflict with rulings from other Federal courts.
The Supreme court is charged with addressing such conflicts.
The way this has worked is that judges issue rulings and those rulings are often "stayed" (not put into effect) to allow for appeal. However, when significant harm is being done prior to such appeals playing out, judges will not stay those rulings.
That can create conflict between the 94 Federal court districts when a court in one district rules one way in a case and a court in another district rules another way in a similar case.
And the way that's resolved is that those cases are appealed to the Supreme court which removes the conflict.
The problem with today's ruling is that it empowers bad actors to ignore rulings from some inferior jurisdictions and operate with impunity in other inferior jurisdictions.
More tellingly, the ruling specifically limits inferior court rulings to the specific parties to a case. As such, if the government acts unlawfully, only those who have actively filed suit against the government are covered by such rulings -- even if the actions taken by the government are blatantly illegal and/or the government's actions will likely be deemed inappropriate on appeal.
Which opens a loophole allowing the government to circumvent the courts (which are a co-equal branch of government and not meant to be subservient to the other branches) by blatantly breaking the law (e.g., stripping a natural born and/or naturalized citizens of their rights as citizens and shipping them off to god knows where without due process) against those who have not filed suit (either because they don't have the resources to do so and/or are deprived of the opportunity to do so by the executive branch).
And as long as losing party (in this case the executive branch) doesn't appeal (either to appeals courts and/or the Supreme Court) their loss(es) in inferior court(s), the Supreme Court never has the opportunity to address the conflicts (if any, as this is still a loophole even if no other courts have ruled on similar cases), essentially giving the Executive branch carte blanche to do whatever they want to anyone who hasn't pre-emptively filed suit and/or anyone they illegally (i.e., without due process) hold incommunicado, whether in the US or on foreign soil.
I'm not sure how things work in your country (as you didn't say which one it was), but I'm guessing that you wouldn't appreciate being disappeared without recourse if the government unilaterally decides to do so.
The issue isn't whether a single Federal judge can make rulings affecting the nation, but rather that the Executive and Legislative Branches must heed the rulings of the Judicial Branch, regardless of where those rulings originate.
If the other branches don't like it, they can appeal (and the Executive Branch doesn't even have to wait for such cases to reach the Supreme Court via the appeals process, they can go directly to the Supreme Court and ask them for a ruling immediately) such rulings.
This decision stands that on its head, effectively saying that if you are not a named plaintiff in any Federal court case, any ruling doesn't apply to you unless and until the Supreme court rules on the case one way or another.
Which, as I mentioned, allows the Executive Branch to avoid judicial scrutiny by not appealing rulings against them.
In the past, the Executive Branch would need to get appeals courts and, eventually, the Supreme Court to rule, removing ambiguity and conflicts (if any), this ruling creates a fractured and ambiguous legal landscape where relief from government overreach only applies to those with the ability and resources to sue in Federal court.
This is not fixing something that's broken, it's creating a multi-tiered justice system that the Executive Branch can manipulate to do pretty much anything it wants, even if it's blatantly (like stripping natural born citizens of their citizenship -- cf. the Fourteenth Amendment[0] to our constitution) illegal.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un... [1]
[1] Section 1 of the 14th amendment reads: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." [2]
[2] To clarify, since you're not from/in the US, Amendments to our constitution, once ratified (by 2/3 majorities in both houses of congress and by the legislatures of 3/4 of the several states -- the 14th was ratified in 1868, so this is nothing new), are incorporated into our constitution -- which is the supreme law of the land in the US.
I think this statement clarifies it for me > The issue isn't whether a single Federal judge can make rulings affecting the nation, but rather that the Executive and Legislative Branches must heed the rulings of the Judicial Branch, regardless of where those rulings originate.
And that makes perfect sense. Thanks for your thorough response.
That is the appropriate way to determine national uniformity in law.
I would not have thought that this is what the Constitution says, but the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of what the Constitution says. That's not in the Constitution, either, but they've appropriated that job for two centuries, so we let them get away with it. The "it's not illegal if the President does it" part is new, though they've been leading up to it for decades, so it's not really surprising.
Edit: actually, even that is overstating it. This is an extremely narrow ruling that is mainly about the powers of federal judges. It's the sort of ruling that the "other side" will trumpet as settled law when they're the ones in power again.
Forgive student loans? No authority!
End birthright citizenship? Well, he's the boss!
For example, a president is granted authority to command the military and issue pardons. They have absolute immunity for any act performed using these authorities, including illegal acts such as assassinating or deporting a political opponent or accepting bribes in return for pardons. This is not a matter of opinion or a controversial interpretation, these consequences were discussed during the case and in the opinion, and the court accepted them.
And notably, exactly the same Republican-nominated Supreme Court judges did not do anything to interfere with exactly the same legal process (nationwide injunctions) when they were aimed at a Democratic president. See, e.g. Biden's student loan forgiveness executive order.
The president absolutely is accountable. The problem is the Congress for their own reasons refuse to hold it to account. The Congress could remove any president in less than 24 hours with simple majority for no reason whatsoever.
The Court has long considered that the president has a duty to follow the law, but also that the Court can’t compel the president to follow the law. That is a political question. Congress alone can stop a president by impeaching and removing them from office. Not only can’t the Court initiate impeachments, impeachment is unreviewable by the Court.
If there’s a servile Congress, it means voters can elect a law breaker as president. They are going to get a president who breaks the law.
And this is what’s happening. People voted for an abuser, a rapist, a felon, a conspiracy theorist who lies about the outcome of elections, lies that VPOTUS can and should overturn them, and even sent a mob to have that VPOTUS assassinated for refusing to comply with that illegal order. Then boasted he’d pardon all those criminals who were in his service. And despite all of this, people voted for him again.
The people got exactly what they voted for.
"The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office."
The judicial branch interprets the law, but it doesn’t direct executive enforcement decisions
Not appealing can be politically controversial and that’s part of how democracy works
We are not left with no tools. Just need to use the right ones
Let's not pretend all assertions are equally worth entertaining. Maybe it's "misleading" if you're Stephen Miller, but every court case where it's ever been heard and the legislative record at the time of adopting the 14th amendment show that citizenship is guaranteed. The Trump administration hasn't even raised it in appeals!
> Howard said that the clause "is simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already, that every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States."[30] He added that citizenship "will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons"[30]—a comment which would later raise questions as to whether Congress had originally intended that U.S.-born children of foreign parents were to be included as citizens.[32]
The illusion some want you to believe, is that it is.
Look at how history has played out. When a government is nearly universally despised by it's people it can be overthrown by mass action, basically bloodless and sometimes with a good outcome.
However, so long as the government has a reasonable sized core of support the outcome is always bad. Violent overthrow always brings the most ruthless, not the best for the people.
Note that this does not apply to throwing out a colonial power. There are multiple examples of good outcomes from throwing out colonial powers by force.
The world is always in flux.
I think Brian Thompson was a fuckface (and all the others who help enable the evils there in the name of profit) but he was basically doing what America has deemed not only fine but noble - make as much money as possible without fully breaking the law (or, more accurately, being forced to stop by the law - many routinely and intentionally break the law in their pursuit). Half the country loves and celebrates this behavior to the point where politicians _brag_ about how good they are at it.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_and_sentencing_of_Robe...
here's a success story: marijuana. WA and CO just.. decided to legalize it. blatantly against Federal law. even if it stays inside the state, by Wickard v Filburne and the supremacy clause it was a (mild) rebellion. we stared the Feds down and they blinked.
do more of that.
"""Amendments to the Constitution may be proposed in one of two ways: a two-thirds supermajority votes of each body of United States Congress or a convention called by Congress on application of two-thirds (currently 34) of the states. Once proposed, the amendment must be ratified by three-quarters (currently 38) of the states (either through the state legislatures, or ratification conventions, whichever "mode of ratification" Congress selects)."""
- the wikipedia page on Supermajority, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermajority#United_States
In the United States, the Constitution is federal law. In fact, it is the supreme law of the land. Full stop.
cf. US Constitution, Article VI Clause 2.[0][1]
[0] https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/full-text
It's written by the legislature.
>What does the court weigh against federal law when considering if it's enforceable or not?
When ruling whether it's enforceable or not, they weight it against the constitution, and against itself.
When ruling how to enforce it, they interpret it primarily against itself.
Forgive a possibly silly question but in what sense does being "in" Florida mean you are bound by Florida state law when you leave? How long did you need to be in Florida before you became bound by its law? What if you fall pregnant after you left? Can you be in breach without ever having been in Florida, and a LEO can therefore take you there and charge you?
But let's look at the birthright case that this ruling comes from.
Let's say Nevada state sues the federal government. The ruling is made from their district court that birthright citizenship is clear and this EO is illegal. An injunction is placed against the EO.
The state of Kentucky does not sue.
Previously, the Nevada court injunction would apply nationally. The EO is unconstitutional. EOs are federal, the constitution is federal. So, clearly, it is unconstitutional everywhere and must be stopped.
The federal government can then go through several layers of appeal to prove that this was a mistake and the EO is legal. All the way up to SCOTUS, who makes the final judgement and cannot be appealed.
What SCOTUS just ruled is that the injunction against the federal government only holds the EO from applying to the specific litigant. That can be a whole state, a group of people, or a single individual. Even though the EO is now ruled unconstitutional in the eyes of the federal court de jure, it is de facto still the law of the land by default to all other entities.
And it gets worse. A litigant cannot appeal to the next court, only a defendant that loses. And SCOTUS only has to address cases that are appealed. There is no mandatory reconciliation process. That means, for an infinite amount of time, individual people will have different constitutional interpretations that require a background of every case that has ever involved them.
So, back to our example. If the federal government loses in Nevada and there is no ruling in Kentucky... What the fuck even happens? Someone is or is not a citizen, that's literally the point behind Dread Scott and Obergfell, but they've contradicted those cases and invented a constitutional superposition.
So, in Nevada a naturalized citizen with non-citizen parents is... A citizen? Because of the injunction? And what if they're in Kentucky, but were born in Nevada? Or vice versa?
But, no, this isn't a state law. It's federal. Which means it doesn't matter what state you're in when you do it, it's still illegal. And federal LEO had the authority to try you in a different location than where you were arrested. So - born in Nevada or Kentucky, where you are now, that doesn't matter. Effectively, you have no citizenship. Again, this is quite literally Dread Scott.
This SCOTUS ruling effectively disables the constitution and dissolves the union of states. I'm not being dramatic, this is also the opinion of Sotomayor.
Curiously, this does not actually extend to other cases. So, say, if McDonalds gets in trouble and an injunction placed against them. That still applies universally.
Britain its mostly UK Law, with bits of "no, thats English law, this is Scotland" on top. I emigrated so long ago the national appeals structure has changed and I don't entirely understand when it applies and overrides. But immigration is clearly nation-wide.
I think "birthright" citizenship is pretty alien to most legal regimes. Ireland might be the one people think about in the Europe/Britain context. Used to be a lot of pregnant women flying in late stage. But, thats not to call it wrong or decry what the appeals in the US were trying to do. It was amended into the constitution a very long time ago, and until recently what the current WH is trying to do was seen as "fringe law" but now seems core.
https://www.texastribune.org/2024/02/09/texas-abortion-trans...
Yep, agreed. I already added an edit saying exactly the same thing.
"C. The District Court’s Remedy Was Improper" is a section of the petition for cert in The mifeprestone case from the Biden admin[0], where the SC overruled the district court's PI, but declined to address the question of whether it's PI was reasonable.
[0]: https://www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docketfiles/html/public/...
This might have been the case in the region you grew up, or you might be deceived by narratives in mainstream political discourse (which are driven more by politicians, interest groups, and media than by popular opinion). Regardless, there are plenty of national policy polls that show high Republican support for a wide array of consumer protection policies. This one turned up from a quick web search:
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/50343-national-po...
The 3 highest-supported consumer protection policies among Republicans:
- 88%: Increasing restrictions on telemarketers' use of automated dialing and robocalling
- 85%: Banning excessive price increases during emergencies
- 78%: Creating a federal digital-privacy bill of rights to protect personal data and privacy online
And here are the 3 lowest (the dataset is only for policies supported by a majority from both parties):
- 56%: Imposing stricter penalties on companies that use monopolistic practices
- 60%: Banning credit agencies from reporting information on unpaid medical bills
- 64%: Requiring all electronic device manufacturers to make their products compatible with the same type of charger
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-are-in-the-us-...
https://www.militaryonesource.mil/data-research-and-statisti...
(position derived from first principles and threat modeling, with input from several US military service members and a physical defense subject matter expert)
No matter how much I hypothetically might train on firearms, I'm pretty sure if a SWAT team (or the federal equivalent) shows up at my house, they're going to arrest me no matter what I do. Well, no, that's not true: if I pull out a firearm, they'll kill me. No need for an arrest then.
And sure, maybe just one or two officers show up at my home. Either I still lose in a firefight, or they leave and come back with more firepower, and then I lose. I suppose before their second visit I can run? Not sure to where, though, and not sure how I'll get out of the country, living nowhere near a land border.
> 5 million people participated in the No Kings protest, more than double total active military members on US soil, for example.
I'm not sure which position you're taking here, but I don't buy the idea that one armed civilian is equal to one member of the US military when it comes to predicting who is going to win. I don't even buy the idea that two armed civilians are equal to one military member. Also consider all the right-wing nut-job militia groups in the US; they would certainly join in, on the side of the military.
Training, coordination, and access to the best weaponry (and ammunition) will win. US military will beat down 5 million civilians, no problem. Probably even 10 or 20 million. I could even see the military bombing cities; Trump already seems to think LA is "in rebellion" based on his National Guard and Marine deployments. Only hope there is that enough people in the military realize what they're doing and refuse to fight. Not sure I'd want to bet on that, though.
For people who believe the US will slide (or already has slid) into authoritarianism, and believe they have a strong chance of being targeted by the government in the future, the only sane thing to do is to leave the country now. It really hurts me to say that, but that's where we are. 77M people voted for this disgusting garbage, so this is what we have.
> Mr. MADISON, objected to a trial of the President by the Senate, especially as he was to be impeached by the other branch of the Legislature, and for any act which might be called a misdemeanor. The President under these circumstances was made improperly dependent. He would prefer the Supreme Court for the trial of impeachments, or rather a tribunal of which that should form a part.
> Mr. PINKNEY disapproved of making the Senate the Court of impeachments, as rendering the President too dependent on the Legislature. If he opposes a favorite law, the two Houses will combine agst. him, and under the influence of heat and faction throw him out of office.
Ultimately it was decided that "in four years he can be turned out", so it was not worth addressing further. Indeed some argued that the President should not be impeachable at all because of this.
> Mr. KING expressed his apprehensions that an extreme caution in favor of liberty might enervate the Government we were forming. He wished the House to recur to the primitive axiom that the three great departments of Govts. should be separate & independent: that the Executive & Judiciary should be so as well as the Legislative: that the Executive should be so equally with the Judiciary. Would this be the case, if the Executive should be impeachable? It had been said that the Judiciary would be impeachable. But it should have been remembered at the same time that the Judiciary hold their places not for a limited time, but during good behaviour. It is necessary therefore that a forum should be established for trying misbehaviour. Was the Executive to hold his place during good behaviour? The Executive was to hold his place for a limited term like the members of the Legislature: Like them particularly the Senate whose members would continue in appointmt the same term of 6 years he would periodically be tried for his behaviour by his electors, who would continue or discontinue him in trust according to the manner in which he had discharged it. Like them therefore, he ought to be subject to no intermediate trial, by impeachment. He ought not to be impeachable unless he held his office during good behaviour, a tenure which would be most agreeable to him; provided an independent and effectual forum could be devised. But under no circumstances ought he to be impeachable by the Legislature. This would be destructive of his independence and of the principles of the Constitution. He relied on the vigor of the Executive as a great security for the public liberties.
Moreover, assuming that the "winner" of a case has gotten "relief," they no longer have standing to sue.
That said, the issue at hand doesn't include a decision on the merits of a case, but rather what the scope of a Preliminary Injunction (PI)[0] might be.
In the example I used, if a court implements a PI it's to limit the potential harm to those impacted by the harm claimed by the plaintiffs.
The SCOTUS ruling limits the scope of such a PI to just those who are either directly named as parties to the case and/or those within the jurisdiction of the district court.
In that circumstance, there is no set of cases to be consolidated since no trial has been held.
Given a government acting in bad faith, this leaves open the option that those harmed by the action of the government can be detained and moved outside the jurisdiction of the district court. At which point, according the the SCOTUS majority, the government can cause the harm being litigated and anyone caught up in this would need to bring a new case in the new federal district jurisdiction, even though Federal law applies everywhere in the US.
Please note that at the point a PI is granted, no one has "won" anything -- only that the judge has ruled that there is harm (and as such, standing to bring the case) and that those bringing the case are likely to succeed on the merits.
Again, since a PI isn't precedent, and the litigants claiming harm have already gotten relief -- at least until the trial is complete, they have no standing to push anyone to extend the PI to additional litigants in other Federal district jurisdictions, even though the legal question is relevant across all those jurisdictions, as it's Federal action.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Injunction#Preliminary_injunct...
While federal law applies uniformly, reasonable people and courts can disagree on controversial issues. Localized PIs allow diverse judicial input and foster a broader dialogue before a final ruling.
Court shopping for nationwide injunctions, common in cases like Obama’s DACA or Trump’s policies, lets one judge halt national policy…
Affirming a democratically elected executive’s mandate, Obama with DACA or Trump with immigration reforms is reasonable and respects the separation of powers.
IMO Congress needs to act more effectively, passing clear laws on issues like immigration to reduce reliance on executive orders and judicial battles.
That doesn't matter if it's a federal issue (which it would have to be if it's in federal court). A single district judge dictating national policy temporarily, while a higher court makes its determination, is exactly what they're there for.
Either the activity is legal (nationwide) by federal law, or it's illegal (nationwide) by federal law. Limiting to the plaintiffs violates equal protection.
You're right, though, it is different; birthright citizenship is spelled out, very clearly, in the Constitution. It's an even plainer wrong.
It's Calvinball.
Likewise, in 1868 the writers of the fourteenth amendment probably couldn’t conceive of rapid international travel and the possibility that pregnant women could just show up weeks before their due date and their newborn child should “obviously” be an American citizen.
The amendment was quite obviously targeted at Native Americans and slaves, not any and all pregnant women the world over who manage to reach the US before giving birth. But as you’re noticing, there’s multiple ways people can interpret laws. It’s rarely as cut and dry as “this is obviously against the law!!!”
That'd be a deeply ironic thing to cite as evidence for this court.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textualism
"Textualism is a formalist theory in which the interpretation of the law is based exclusively on the ordinary meaning of the legal text, where no consideration is given to non-textual sources, such as intention of the law when passed, the problem it was intended to remedy, or significant questions regarding the justice or rectitude of the law."
Legislative intent didn't save the Voting Rights Act, or the EPA.
yes, exactly, if you're born to an ambassador in the US, you aren't subject to the jurisdiction.
Meanwhile:
> The proposition before us, I will say, Mr. President, relates simply in that respect to the children begotten of Chinese parents in California, and it is proposed to declare that they shall be citizens. We have declared that by law; now it is proposed to incorporate the same provision in the fundamental instrument of the nation. I am in favor of doing so. I voted for the proposition to declare that the children of all parentage whatever, born in California, should be regarded and treated as citizens of the United States, entitled to equal civil rights with other citizens of the United States. . . . Here is a simple declaration that a score or a few score of human beings born in the United States shall be regarded as citizens of the United States, entitled to civil rights, to the right of equal defense, to the right of equal punishment for crime with other citizens; and that such a provision should be deprecated by any person having or claiming to have a high humanity passes all my understanding and comprehension.
(the "declared that by law" is referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1866 that Howard used as the basis of the 14th amendment: "all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States")
What? Absolutely you are. Are you trying to claim there's some strange diplomatic immunity here?
https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-7-part-o-chapter-...
> Children born in the United States to accredited foreign diplomatic officers do not acquire citizenship under the 14th Amendment since they are not “born . . . subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.”
(page is substantially unchanged since the last administration)
> This Court's prior cases... cannot be distinguished on the asserted ground that persons who have entered the country illegally are not "within the jurisdiction" of a State even if they are present within its boundaries and subject to its laws. Nor do the logic and history of the Fourteenth Amendment support such a construction. Instead, use of the phrase "within its jurisdiction" confirms the understanding that the Fourteenth Amendment's protection extends to anyone, citizen or stranger, who is subject to the laws of a State, and reaches into every corner of a State's territory. Pp. 457 U. S. 210-216.
> The author of the clause didn't think it applied to the children of aliens, so it doesn't seem crazy to me. >> Howard said that the clause "is simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already, that every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States."[30] He added that citizenship "will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons"[30]—a comment which would later raise questions as to whether Congress had originally intended that U.S.-born children of foreign parents were to be included as citizens.[32]
The tip of the spear is consistently a bunch of incels and incel-adjacent losers. Think Meal Team 6, not Seal Team 6.
The vast majority of Americans won’t “see” anything, but there could also be all sorts of opportunists taking advantage of social dysfunction.
A million good reasons to go buy a gun, and the only reasons not to are either fatalism that you’re completely fucked or blind faith that nothing could possibly happen.
It is illogical to think either of those but find the in-between state so implausible that it’s not worth hedging with $<1000.
Lawyer. Passport. Locksmith. Gun. (A Talk About Risk and Preparedness) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33509164 - November 2022
> This is a presentation about risk, preparedness, and how to do make your best attempt to build defenses against some of the worst threats and potential problems that might ever arise in your life. Keeping your loved ones as well as your community safe is something to always keep in mind and this presentation walks through some of the most critical steps that it is possible to take... before your world explodes in a disaster.
(I work in risk management)
As it is, with gun ownership leaning firmly right, Trump has a massive number of armed paramilitaries that he could lean on. In any large-scale suppression of political dissent, those would be the people breaking your door at night, not uniformed feds (there simply isn't enough of the latter). Thus even if you're anti-gun in principle, it still makes sense for left-leaning people in this country to arm given the overall political climate.
There are far more people willing to defend their homes than there are people willing to get shot in the face breaking into someone's home.
You never know who's going to deputize themselves as "law enforcement", with the quiet encouragement and plausible deniability of the ruling political party. Guns are unquestionably useful defensive tools against these people.
This is the actual use case. It’s a pretty established pattern of non-governmental actors like those mentioned being the tip of the authoritarian spear.
Those people should be shot in the face upon entering their first few homes or businesses, while courts and juries will still have the wherewithal to acquit anyone defending themselves.
(This is also something I was alluding to with "issuing pardons for the rebels on your side" which is already happening, of course.)
And so then it just falls back to "the good guys just need to shoot the fascist armed militia members before they shoot the good guys" which is... difficult to guarantee...
Sen. Edgar Cowan of Pennsylvania said "I am really desirous to have a legal definition of ‘citizenship of the United States. Is the child of the Chinese immigrant in California a citizen?" He didn't think that child should be.
Sen. Conness of California said he thought it should cover "the children begotten of Chinese parents in California, and it is proposed to declare that they shall be citizens. I voted for the proposition to declare that the children of all parentage whatever, born in California, should be regarded and treated as citizens of the United States, entitled to equal civil rights with other citizens of the United States." And let's remember, as Conness was certainly aware, that many of those Chinese laborers had been imported illegally.
They knew what they were passing, and they knew it included birthright citizenship. Senators who wanted to alter the Amendment to exclude some people failed.
This ‘jurisdiction’ claim essentially only applied to people who had a diplomatic status while in the US. A traveler from Canada has no special right against being prosecuted (just like you would not were you to go to, say Britain).
A governmental figure from Canada would have protections - we would need to interact with another sovereign to hold them accountable.
This really has nothing to do with tourism, outside deceitful assertions on television.
Regarding Britain, here’s an example of someone not being subject to the jurisdiction of a country after committing a serious crime: https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/harry-dunn-uk-anne-sacoolas...
I hope this clarifies your misunderstanding about the meaning of jurisdiction.
If a UK person is on US soil and breaks a US law, they will be prosecuted by the US. The US can choose to extradite to the UK, but that's not really relevant.
There's a right way and a wrong way to go about addressing problems. If the president wants to exclude natural-born children of illegal immigrants from citizenship, he can lead an effort to amend the constitution.
Where exactly is the unsustainable part of this?
According to the SF Chronicle, about 72 million US households (40% of the population) paid no federal income tax in 2022. I don't have exact numbers but I doubt anyone would dispute that public benefits flow disproportionately to those 72 million households for obvious reasons. So the cause and effect of being a citizen and paying taxes is very tenuous.
> Where exactly is the unsustainable part of this?
If it's unsustainable, then someone should propose a constitutional amendment to fix it.
I would dispute it. One of the main public benefits, if not the main benefit, is protection of property rights. Those with the most property disproportionately take advantage of this protection.
Are you deliberately confusing taxes with federal income tax?
The 14th Amendment was passed in 1868. Government benefits were basically nonexistent at the time, and besides, with the US population at under 40 million people, we needed more citizens, not fewer. Your "logical" argument is completely anachronistic and irrelevant.
The conservative side of the Supreme Court claims to rule based on what the writers of the Constitution had in mind. This is another example of how they completely ignore what the writers/framers/etc. of the Constitution intended as soon as it interferes with the larger conservative agenda that they serve.
You don’t seem to think the USA is very exceptional…
The core premise of your racist rant is built around a the massive edge case. Reality is this policy will probably disenfranchise more children of American soldiers born abroad than prevent the alien invasion you’re scared of.
The notion that the sins of the father impact the child is repugnant. The interests of the nation as a whole not allowing a clear violation of the birthright of our fellow citizens have to be addressed in a lower court, as the Supreme Court isn’t even required to hear their case.
You’re allowing yourself to be manipulated into expanding the power of an executive who will never leave and a court whose power and individual avoidance of culpability for bribery and corruption. I suppose you’ll shrug when we decide that the electoral college can choose to follow the “silent majority” as opposed to the voters.
As someone who has reading comprehension above the high-school level, it's blindingly obvious that there was no racism in GP's post. Your accusation is factually incorrect, logically fallacious, emotionally manipulative, and actively degrades the quality of HN (and, obviously, badly breaks the guidelines). Either your logical reasoning skills are deeply lacking, or you're aware that your claim false and maliciously making it anyway to deceive others, which is deeply immoral and disgusting. Regardless of which of those this is, never do this.
I suspect, if they commit a crime or overstay their visa, we'll suddenly decide we have a little jurisdiction after all.
And that argument is bullshit.
> Trump's argument is that people born in America to tourist parents here for a few weeks (for example) aren't subject to the jurisdiction of America
Yes they are. If they commit a crime on US soil, they will face charges in a US court, because they are subject to the jurisdiction of those courts. (They will also be deported, but that's another matter.)
The only people on US soil who are not subject to the US's jurisdiction are foreign nationals traveling on a diplomatic passport ("diplomatic immunity").
> Sure, birthright citizenship was the reason for the suit, but the core issue was judicial overreach. Don't get mad because the way your side was "winning" was by cheating, and they were stopped.
Er, what? Nationwide injunctions have been a thing since the 1970s. No judge is "cheating" by putting one in place. I'm mad because Trump thinks the constitution is toilet paper.
If you want to talk about chaos, this SCOTUS ruling will create chaos, and more lawlessness, and make it even more difficult for people to obtain justice in this country -- a place where it was already pretty damn difficult (regardless of the party in power).
In ordinary times, the notion of establishing precedent that immigrants are not under the jurisdiction of the US would be met with sputtering indignance for all but the most idealistic anarchists. Because that goes way beyond open borders, it promotes foreigners to super-citizens untouchable by the law.
First of all, if an undocumented person commits a crime, they're not going to just let them go because they didn't have a birth certificate or passport or a documented name. They'll charge you, try you, and convict you same as anyone else. That's what it means to be subject to the jurisdiction.
The "subject to the jurisdiction" clause has two reasons. First and foremost is American Indians. American Indians, at the time, were explicitly not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. Various tribes had treaties with the US government explicitly exempting their tribe members from federal, state, and local jurisdiction. At the same time, they were not considered US citizens. An American Indian could literally commit murder and the only legal recourse was to petition their tribe to bring justice to them. (there was also extra-legal recourse, which was a lot more common, but that's neither here nor there)
The other reason is diplomats. Diplomats have diplomatic immunity. They commit a murder? Not a lot you can do. (Hollywood overstates this, but not by as much as you might think) They didn't want to grant citizenship to the child if every diplomat.
This doesn't apply to illegal immigrants. There is no treaty or existing legal framework which grants them immunity to the law.
However, there is no just world where you can revoke citizenship from existing Americans. Especially under the vague terms they used.
Furthermore, the constitution itself is what defines it in clear language. Birthright citizenship can only be changed via constitutional amendment.
Some people with no lived experience of "homeland" have been sent "back there" and in related cases, Australian indigenous have been threatened with never having had citizenship because of association with neighbouring countries. The courts came down pretty heavily on that one thank goodness.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/06/30/nx-s1-5445398/denaturalizatio...
So every person wronged by the government should sue individually?
The point is that relief should be tied to proper procedure, not handed out universally by default. One judge shouldn’t decide national policy based on one plaintiff unless the case is structured to justify it
The actual parties will have been shipped off to another country, unable to bring the case, and anyone not already deported would lack standing to challenge the action.
That seems awfully convenient for the executive.
If every single case must be prosecuted individually, those who have been illegally robbed of due process will already be stuck in El Salvadorean (or South Sudanese, etc.) prisons and unable to challenge it in US courts.
In other words, ICE effectively gets carte blanche to continue violating constitutional due process under the ruling. The "judicial overreach" complaint is a distraction - injunctions can always be appealed at a higher level in the court system (excepting when the SC does it themselves), so there was already a mechanism to handle problematic injunctions.
The implications for the unconstitutional executive order regarding birthright citizenship is just as gross, as an individual whose citizenship gets restored via court challenge will almost certainly face repeated citizenship challenges by other red states for the rest of their lives, any of which may require additional time in court to address.
Could you find me the one that lets the president's office strip citizenship from people?
What chaos that would be worse than the chaos of jurisdictional fracturing they're asking for here and the possibility to not let cases escalate to courts with supposed national jurisdiction? Rulings were stayed all the time.
The existence of a national injunction seems built in to the job of a federal judge since federal law is definitionally national. Voiding it only locally, or only in regard to specific plaintiffs, seems like a huge wishful reach.
> The existence of a national injunction seems built in to the job of a federal judge since federal law is definitionally national
That’s a clever line.
See, there is a difference between saying “this law is unconstitutional” and saying “this law is blocked for everyone, everywhere.”
And... who was suffering for it, exactly? How was it hurting me?
> That’s a clever line. > > See, there is a difference between saying “this law is unconstitutional” and saying “this law is blocked for everyone, everywhere.”
"This law is only blocked for these people" is the less "clever", more "obvious" situation in your mind? No, that's a clever hack that same sneaky bastard came up with to justify removing further obstacles for the executive to increase its own power.
But it seems to fly against the face of history. Federal law has been in the business of preempting local authority for centuries. Now we want to unwind that and let jurisdictions opt-out case-by-case?
It's not a veto, it's a delay until appeal. If the lower court is wrong, SCOTUS has never had any issue with settling the question.
The fact that the government isn't appealing means that they know they can't win on appeal, and what they are doing is illegal.
If the executive avoids appeals to dodge precedent, that’s a separate (and valid) concern. But the solution isn’t to stretch injunction power beyond its legal limits
It is about who gets to block national policy for everyone, based on one local case. That kind of sweeping relief was never authorized by Congress
It doesn't take months or years for SCOTUS to determine whether or not they will take a case. If they don't want to take it, they are fine with the arguments made in the lower courts, and tough shit, but that means that the loser is in the wrong.
> If the executive avoids appeals to dodge precedent, that’s a separate (and valid) concern.
You're damn right it's a valid concern. It's a valid concern because this removed the only mechanism that there was to force them to address it.
> until SCOTUS steps in, which can take months or years
If SCOTUS decides that something is urgent, they'll step in immediately. If they wait months or years, then they are signalling that the harm of waiting is not high enough to take up their immediate attention.
Doesn't this just change most of these lawsuits into a class action where the class is say all the people born in the US of non-citizen parents, with the class represntative in the most friendly venue and then a district judge can accept the class and issue the injuction if they see fit?
Then the executive branch can presumably appeal the injuction and the class certification, and in the meantime, the injuction isn't valid for people who aren't in the class, but they probably aren't covered by the executive order either.
And I guess a handful of people immediately effected might file separately too, but if the class is certified (even if challenged) their case will probably be joined?
Class certification for the entire United States of those classes of people might be too large. Usually the courts prefer a more narrow class
some people will fall through the cracks in the meantime (and you may not like this answer), but that doesn’t automatically justify expanding judicial authority beyond what Article III or the separation of powers allows
The system without national injunctions is functioning as designed
An injunction is not a veto. I'm tired of people using this disingenuous phrasing in order to make a weak argument sound stronger.
This is a better point than you realize, and in the opposite direction you intend.
Immigration in the 1800s was a… cursory process. Not only would those kids be citizens, but their parents would have had little trouble staying around.
We had very few rules beyond “don’t be Chinese” until 1891. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1891?wprov=...
Just to return to this for a moment… this is quite incorrect. Native Americans were explicitly not included. That came later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
"Consistent with the views of the clause's author, Senator Jacob M. Howard, the Supreme Court held that because Indian reservations are not under the federal government's jurisdiction, Native Americans born on such land are not entitled to birthright citizenship. The 1887 Dawes Act offered citizenship to Native Americans who accepted private property as part of cultural assimilation, while the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act offered citizenship to all Native Americans born within the nation's territorial limits."
SCOTUS did rule on the anchor babies thing, in 1898.
Why am I supposed to be mad about people doing this, exactly? Because of hazy "rules are rules" talk?
Will you see eventual retreat, or will you see eventual overwhelming force? The US didn't want to bulldoze these other countries and jail or kill everyone and set up a new state; very different than how the US would handle more Wacos.
It’s because they were raising children to rape them.
So tired of this equivocating on what those people were about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomatic_immunity#In_the_Uni...
I don't like going to dictionaries for arguments, but look at "subject" adjective definition 1 here: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/subject
> owing obedience or allegiance to the power or dominion of another
Merriam-Webster orders their dictionary "oldest known meaning first", and as I understand it the "allegiance" part of this definition is what's been forgotten about, but is what the citizenship argument is about. The first noun definition has a similar mix of meanings.
Think of it more like a kingly "these are my subjects (and not someone else's)" rather than a simple "they must obey the law because they're here".
https://www.yahoo.com/news/republicans-test-red-line-denatur...
Are you trying to imply that the people who don't pay federal income tax have heavy state tax burdens? Or you think they're making a dent with their sales tax contributions? The only thing that everyone pays indirectly or directly is property taxes, which averages to about 1-2% of income. Again, nothing close to federal income taxes (for those that pay them).
Also this completely handwaves the regressive nature of sales tax, which hits much harder when you spend a large percentage of your income
This further weakens the dishonest posture that tourists are not subject to US law
If a state now sues the federal government on behalf of its citizens that a federal action is illegal, and wins, you now has a situation where a federal action is constitutionally illegal in one state, but is legal in another. How the hell is this consistent?
This doesn't consolidate anything. It removes the thing that forced consolidation - the ability of a court to issue an injunction and stop illegal actions from continuing - which forced the government to either give up, or appeal up. Now, everything is a legal patchwork.
Nationwide injunctions didn’t “force” consolidation. Often, they often blocked it.
We need to follow the process as designed.
This ruling restores pressure to actually appeal and get clarity at the appellate or Supreme Court level.
I’ll admit it’s slower but it’s slower by design. Less patchwork this way.
> The US supreme court has supported Donald Trump’s attempt to limit lower-court orders that have so far blocked his administration’s ban on birthright citizenship
See also:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthright_citizenship_in_th...
Those of us with white skin and no accent may find that a silly prospect. Citizens who are different are already facing this risk.
Constitution does not provide for identical due process between illegal aliens and citizens.
Since expedited removal is authorized under 8 U.S. Code § 1225(b)(1), Courts have held up limited due process for those that not fully admitted or who can’t prove longstanding presence.
Then, you have entry fiction doctrine where those at the border are treated as if they have not entered the US under the law.
Shaughnessy v. United States ex rel. Mezei, 345 U.S. 206 (1953) held that an immigrant stopped at the border had limited due process rights.
Finally, because of the Plenary Ppwer Doctrine, immigration is considered a sovereign function of the federal government and Congress and the executive have broad authority over who may enter and remain in the US
Courts can still block unlawful policies, but broad relief should come through class actions
This ruling doesn’t undo federal supremacy. It just puts guardrails around how relief is issued
Without you telling me any specific harms of the "chaos and inconsistency", and how you think they will be reduced now, then I can only consider the harms of the new potentials for inconsistency which is "the excecutive intentionally does not appeal when they lose to small groups because they want to be able to continue to overreach nationally."
What are the concrete examples of chaotic things that caused issues that you don't think could happen now?
1. In 2017, one district court blocked Trump’s travel ban nationwide, while others upheld it. That led to confusion at airports and legal whiplash
2. In 2019, one judge blocked the public charge immigration rule nationwide, while others allowed it. The rule ended up applying in some States and not others
3. Multiple district courts issued conflicting nationwide injunctions on Title IX guidance for transgender students during the Obama and Trump years
Those are just some
Inconsistency is still possible. But the alternative was worse
What we had was a race to the most favorable courtroom
The fix isn’t unlimited injunctions. It’s reform and not stretching judicial power beyond what the law allows
So now you can be a US citizen when in New York but not while in Kentucky. Sure to cause no chaos.
The rulings just means an injunction only affects the parties in that case or a certified class and not everyone everywhere automatically
Someone might be deported, incarcerated, or otherwise harmed before the courts even rule on whether their rights were violated.
US legal system highly values procedural fairness and due process.
This is by design, not accident
Meaning the executive can just keep deporting without due process or honoring birthrights, so long as they back down for anyone with the means to challenge it. (And their lawyer is fast enough, and knows which district they were spirited off to in the middle of the night.)
Illegal aliens have less due process by law.
Obviously we do not need to litigate undocumented immigrants before deporting them.
Because what could go wrong with not determining if someone is a citizen or not before deporting them?
why not just shoot them? seems less cruel than deporting them to an active war zone in Libya or South Sudan, or incarcerating them for life in CECOT where they'll be raped and tortured before being murdered.
That’s the months and years part
We can’t be circumventing the process at the lower levels by forum shopping
So fix forum shopping by making the president a king?
DC v Heller filed in 2003 supreme court decision in 2008
NYSRPA v Bruen filed 2018 decision 2022.
Miller v Bonta filed in 2018 still pending after being GVRd after bruen. Currently waiting for 521 days for another opinion from the 9th.
Young v Hawaii filed 2012 GVRd then dismissed in 2022 as Bruen answered the same issue.
Harrel v Raoul filed 2023 in 2024 the Supreme Court declined to reinstated the preliminary injunction that the Appeals court stayed. Still pending.
Ocean State Tactical v Rhode Island filed in 2022. The Supreme Court declined to instate a preliminary injunction in May of 2025. Still pending.
Renna v Bonta currently at 675 days waiting for an opinion from the 9th.
Boland v Bonta currently at 675 days waiting for an opinion from the 9th.
Palmer v Lombardo currently at 781 days waiting for an opinion from the 9th.
Koons v Platkin currently at 612 days waiting for an opinion from the 3rd.
There are many more cases with the same pattern.
Petition to change laws, vote, protest, write news articles, start a podcast, donate to causes or org’s you believe in, etc
Use the process and framework that is provided
The point is the Democratic run states refuse to follow the constitution when it comes to the 2a. The courts especially the 9th twist the Supreme Court precedent and outright lie to uphold every garbage gun control law California passes. SCOTUS just doesn't care enough about the 2a to correct the blatant middle finger lower courts keep giving them.
change what law, lol, it's in the constitution.
But certainly don’t use one course of action
Finally injunctions were not envisioned by the Founders. Foreign concept along with circuit court. Only fairly recent
The other avenues are also being obstructed.
And Republicans certainly didn't mind nation wide injunctions when they were used to block much of Biden's agenda. Or violent attempts to stop the transfer of power. Or pardons for everyone involved in attempts to stop the transfer of power ...
You do realize that the underlying case which SCOTUS limited the scope of preliminary injunctions relates to an Executive Order which directly contravenes the 14th Amendment:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to
the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States
I get it. You want to throw lots of folks out. If that's what you want, then that's what you want. But if they can strip one natural born citizen of their citizenship without any due process, they can do that to any citizen -- including you and me. No thanks.
No executive order can override the Constitution.
My point was narrower: when people bring up “due process” it’s important to recognize that not all persons receive the same level of due process in every context. Courts have long held that undocumented individuals and particularly those subject to expedited removal or caught at the border have limited procedural protections compared to citizens
(In addition to other fun things like immunity from criminal prosecution forever, cannot even be investigated in most cases, and cannot be disqualified from office after inciting a riot to stop the transfer of power.)
> Are you arguing against our existing immigration laws that the executive has to enforce?
> weird legal technicality
Indeed, if your ancestors didn't cross the Bering Land Bridge at least 10K years ago then you're clearly not a native, and should be deported back to your continent of origin ASAP. And if you don't like it then I hope your lawyer can catch up to the trucks hauling you to a distant, deportation-happy district where you'll be processed!
Let's just turn to our national ID system...oh wait...
> But a lot less could go wrong than just letting anyone into the country en mass with no practical way to remove them.
Are you suggesting the only two options are extraordinary rendition to concentration camps in El Salvador with no recourse or instant squatters rights for all foreigners?
> You effectively don't have a country at all under that regime.
Let me offer an existence proof: gestures all around to where we're currently standing
We do have birth certificates and in most states it is actually very hard to get state ID without at least residency so yes asking for ID is usually enough.
> So now you can be a US citizen when in New York but not while in Kentucky. Sure to cause no chaos.
You keep saying that the issue will be resolved higher up. How? There's no mechanism for it. The winner of a case can't kick it up to higher courts.
Was the inconsistency resolved?
How is there less room for inconsistency now? If a judge has said five plaintiffs can play on a certain sports team in one jurisdiction, now the sports administrators need to know every ruling in every jurisdiction that their league functions in?
What makes you think "reform" is going to happen here? Have you read much of the material pushing for increased executive power on the right? It's very clear that the goal is solely to remove impediments to stretch executive power to the point that executive power decides what the law allows.
Title IX issue is not resolved. Public charge rule resolved itself because the Biden admin rescinded the rule. But not before creating mass confusion. Trump travel ban was resolved by SCOTUS as valid once Trump modified the ban
The point is that nationwide injunctions from different district courts created that chaos in the first place, often forcing rushed Supreme Court intervention just to untangle conflicting orders
reversing that case law would be a bit much even for Alito, I think.
Non-citizens in removal proceedings get civil hearings, with fewer procedural protection. Expedited removal allows certain undocumented immigrants to be deported without ever seeing a judge, unless they claim asylum or prove long-term presence.
Courts have upheld that due process is contextual. It is not “one-size-fits-all” So yes, undocumented immigrants have a constitutional floor of protections but not the same ceiling as citizens or green card holders
>change what law, lol, it's in the constitution.
To be fair, the Constitution is the law of the land.
And it can be changed. You just need 2/3 of each house of Congress and the legislatures of 3/4 of the states to agree that such a change is a good idea.[0]
It's hard to do (and rightly so), but absolutely doable -- in fact, we've done it 28 times already.
[0] Meaning any such change would require broad-based support. Which is a good thing, imho.
Again, change what? Birthright citizenship has been in the constitution plain as day for 157 years.
"Petition to change laws" is a ludicrous suggestion of a remedy when it's already in the US constitution
>"Petition to change laws" is a ludicrous suggestion of a remedy when it's already in the US constitution
And where did I say otherwise? The amendment process is what it is. Removing birthright citizenship via the amendment process is unlikely in the extreme.
As for me (An American), I think birthright citizenship is a good thing for the US.
How long it's been in the Constitution is irrelevant. It's the supreme law of the land which can only be changed via an arduous (and rightly so) process.
Petitioning "to change laws" isn't ludicrous at all. In fact, that's also enshrined in the Constitution, and for much longer than birthright citizenship.
As to whether or not one might be successful with such petitioning to modify the constitution to remove/redefine birthright citizenship is another thing altogether.
If folks want to spend their time and energy on such a likely fool's errand, they should have at it IMNSHO.
While I don't think the 14th amendment should be changed, I don't have anything to say about whether others should be allowed to advocate for such a change -- as that's the right (via the First Amendment) of all folks in the US to advocate for all kinds of stuff.
And I have just as much right to be vocal in my opposition to such changes.
As such, despite how much you might disagree (I certainly do), please don't advocate for silencing others -- because if they can be silenced, so can you, or me.
All I am advocating for is better safeguards that Congress must pass not throwaway the entire structure by allowing local injunctions.
Understandably people are upset but point the anger at the right branch. Executive is operating within its legal parameters and the legislative branch needs to operate within theirs. Congress needs to provide better safeguards
Huh? Since when is issuing executive orders that attempt to contravene the plain language of the US Constitution, something that's clearly illegal, "operating within [the executive branch's] legal parameters"?
Whether Congress is doing its job or not (I'd argue they're not representing their constituents in any meaningful way -- hell, I wanted to vote against my congressman since I was moved into his district in the last two elections, but he ran unopposed) is irrelevant to a blatantly illegal assault on US citizens by executive order.
There are plenty of things to take Congress to task for, but executive orders (you know, from the executive branch) aren't one of them.
The remedy should come through the right constitutional channels: lawsuits, appeals, congressional action. The concern I raised is about courts going beyond their own limits to impose broad fixes when the real solution lies with Congress or SCOTUS.
then that’s exactly the kind of chaos the Court is trying to fix
This will obviously increase the number conflicting orders by several orders of magnitude, but either way: the conflicting orders are what we want to happen, because it errs on the side of caution.
The fact that some courts disagreed didn't negatively affect me at all. Where was all the "chaos" caused by courts disagreeing? "Policy whiplash"? lol. Might as well go full ridiculous and call it "policy murderdeathkill" or something, that sounds much scarier.
It is about whether our legal system should allow a single district judge to set nationwide policy even when their ruling conflicts with other courts, before the issue has been fully litigated through appeals
What you are advocating for is legal uncertainty at scale.
The new limits push legal questions upward through appeals rather than outward through conflicting orders and ensure national issues are resolved by courts with the authority to decide them.
The distinction I was trying to make isn’t that undocumented people have no rights and it’s just that the process they’re entitled to is different in scope
There are safeguards that could be added such as access to interpreters, better identity verification, etc
But the answer can’t be local injunctions which is what this entire SCOTUS decision was about
Congress could budget and pass a law to fix things. It’s not up to the Executive and Legislative Branch.
The executive swears to uphold the constitution. Not write EOs that clearly violate it, then strategically drop appeals when they lose, so as to undermine the constitution for everyone without the means to dispute their case.
If the executive is dropping appeals to avoid nationwide precedent, that’s a serious problem, but the long-term fix isn’t local injunctions
See my point?
The SCOTUS ruling is about Preliminary Injunctions[0], which aren't remedies and they aren't permanent.
They serve to prevent harm while litigation progresses. This isn't something new, nor (until very recently) has it been very controversial.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Injunction#Preliminary_injunct...
Preliminary injunctions have long been part of the legal system and their role in preventing harm during litigation is well recognized. The recent ruling does not eliminate preliminary injunctions
The case at hand addresses their scope and the authority of district courts to extend them beyond the parties involved in a specific case
The only thing I have consistently raised is maintaining that structure so courts operate within defined authority
It’s about time that SCOTUS reigned things in
A president getting to do literally everything he wants, whenever he wants, as fast as he wants, regardless of legality, is plainly less important than preventing the above from happening. What you are advocating for is a king.
The new limits allow a king-president to illegally harm people potentially indefinitely, until every single person, or at least each individual district, successfully individually files suit to stop him, or until a supreme court gets around to stopping him (years? decades?)
That's obviously way worse than some scary sounding bureaucratic metaphor like "legislative whiplash" which doesn't actually harm me at all. The concern about "legal uncertainty" is a joke compared to actually abusing people and sending them to a gulag without due process
> national issues are resolved by courts with the authority to decide them.
Every court has the authority to decide if an action is unconstitutional. The only thing that changed is that the executive is now free to continue that unconstitutional action until ~300 million people successfully challenge it in ~100 districts. Obviously that is worse, and more "chaotic" than pausing unconstitutional harm to people while the issue is resolved. Especially because it means ~100x more conflicting nationwide orders from different judges.
like requiring coordinated multi-district litigation or pushing for appellate consolidation
This just puts the burden on challengers to build stronger cases, not shortcut national impact through procedural overreach.
Constitution? Never heard of it! If and when you feel like your rights are being abrogated, just file suit and the court system will get to you in the order you filed, plus three to seven years.
If in the meantime you suffered hardship due to actions of the federal government, I have bad news for you forwards you link to wikipedia pages on sovereign and qualified immunity
What is the next step in the process? It no longer matters how many times and how hard you win, no precedent will ever be set.
You talk about making better cases and better arguments? Don't you think that the onus is on the government to do that, when they are both doing something entirely unprecedented, and losing every time it goes to court?
The point of checks and balances isn't to make it quick and easy for the executive to illegally overreach. It's to make it hard.
If they want to move quickly, they should stay within the bounds of the law - which is something that Trump in particular, and his regime in general is utterly incapable of.
Fortunately a thousand years of common law have figured out how to deal with this sort of thing, while those challenges are ongoing. It's called an injunction. It's issued when there's a strong case for an EO violating it, and is done when the violation, if allowed unabated, will cause irreparable harm to the the victims.
The legal process hinges on preventing irreparable harm while a case is being litigated. If it didn't, absolutely horrific things could be done to you under the color of law, and the people doing them would be incentivized to drag the cases out for as long as possible.
This is textbook, black-on-white, criminality from the executive.
Relief is still available through injunctive orders, class actions, appellate review, and coordinated litigation. These are all recognized parts of the legal system and remain available to address serious concerns
Enforcement and effect can vary temporarily due to conflicting judicial rulings thus creating short-term legal fragmentation until it's resolved at a higher level
The state of people either having or not having citizenship defined by either statewide injunction was or wasn’t issued is pure chaos and pretty much indefensible.
Legal fragmentation on injunctions isn’t about denying people’s humanity; it’s about how courts balance power between branches and avoid overstepping.
In this very example people in the US split into two parts: living in states choosing to go against this very illegal executive order or not. Unless you have money to sue government yourself and didn’t end up in a state going against EO your child is gonna be denied the exact humanity you’re talking about. In fact they can be deported soon after being born as assumingly non citizens.
And yes, in this particular case probably it will turn ok, because class certification seem possible. However class certification is very limited at the moment, and, again, in hands of bad faith executive we’ll end up with executive orders built around it. For example we can end up with 10% religious tax (but only if you Muslim). When the case finally reaches the merits just cancel it and change to 12%. This might be non class certifiable, and will create both chaos and inequitable application of the law.
If judges really wanted to solve initial issue of conflicting decisions (not fragmented, since universal injunctions were making decision universal) they should’ve fixed class actions first.
I’m pretty sure we’ll see this all to play out really soon.