President Donald Trump on Friday falsely claimed a Supreme Court decision narrowing the power of courts to issue nationwide injunctions was a “giant win” in his administration’s efforts to block children born in the United States to some immigrant parents from receiving citizenship despite the high court failing to green light the controversial and racially-charged executive order at issue in the case.
Writing on Truth Social, Trump wrote that there’d been a “GIANT WIN” for his administration by the court’s right-wing majority, which stripped federal courts’ authority to issue nationwide injunctions that have blocked key parts of his agenda.
“Even the Birthright Citizenship Hoax has been, indirectly, hit hard. It had to do with the babies of slaves (same year!), not the SCAMMING of our Immigration process,” he said.
At a hastily-arranged news conference, Trump told reporters in the White House briefing room that the court had handed down “a monumental victory for the Constitution, the separation of powers and the rule of law.”
The president claimed a “handful of radical left judges” had been trying to “overrule the rightful powers of the president to stop the American people from getting the policies that they voted for in record numbers” and called the actions of those lower courts “a grave threat to democracy,” using language that mocked Democrats’ arguments that his authoritarian style of governance represented a threat to America’s 250-year-old experiment in democratic rule.
“Instead of merely ruling on the immediate cases before them, these judges have attempted to dictate the law for the entire nation … this as a colossal abuse of power, which never occurred in American history prior to recent decades, and we’ve been hit with more nationwide injunctions than were issued in the entire 20th century,” he said.
The 6-3 ruling, issued along partisan lines and written by Trump appointee Justice Amy Coney Barrett, states that federal judges who had issued such injunctions went too far in blocking his executive order that seeks to unilaterally redefine who gets to be a citizen by exceeding “the equitable authority that Congress has given to the federal courts.”
It did not address the question of whether Trump can block citizenship from newborn Americans who are born to certain immigrant parents.
Instead, the court’s majority sided with arguments advanced by Solicitor General John Sauer, who called the “cascade of universal injunctions” against the administration a “bipartisan problem” that exceeds judicial authority.
More than half of the injunctions issued over the last 70 years were against the Trump administration, according to the Harvard Law Review, as Trump pushed the limits of his authority.
In Trump’s first term in office, his administration faced 64 injunctions, compared to 14 injunctions against Joe Biden and 12 against Barack Obama
The second administration faced 17 within its first two months.
In cases across the country, plaintiffs have pushed for those temporary orders as a tool for critical checks and balances against an administration that critics warn is mounting an ongoing assault against the rule of law.
And in response, the administration used the case not necessarily to argue over whether he can change the 14th Amendment but to target what has become a major obstacle to advancing Trump’s agenda: federal judges blocking aggressive executive actions.
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