Rogue rulings are a credibility crisis for our courts – San Bernardino Sun

There is a major malfunction in a critical part of our federal judiciary: Activist judges at the district court level are imposing nationwide injunctions where they do not belong and demonstrating the kind of political partisanship that will deliver lasting damage to the vital credibility of the courts.

Practically every day, federal judges are contradicting the Constitution and blocking President Donald Trump from exercising his executive authority to deport criminal illegals, reduce wasteful government spending, strengthen our military, and even conduct bilateral foreign policy.

That’s why I introduced—and the Congress passed—the No Rogue Rulings Act. This bill restores the constitutional limits on judicial power by ensuring that district courts can only issue relief to the actual parties before them.

It is contrary to both statute and precedent that a single district judge can obstruct executive actions by the president of the United States and halt the policies that voters elected him to pursue. In this way, the injunctions also rob the people of their voice and deny them the due policies of their choice in a democracy.

This must stop. We are not one nation under judge.

But don’t just take my word for it. Consider the words of President Biden’s own Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar in 2024. “Universal remedies are inconsistent with longstanding limits on equitable relief and the power of Article III courts and impose a severe toll on the federal court system.” She also identified the essential imbalance of these rogue rulings: “The government must prevail in every suit to keep its policy in force, but plaintiffs can derail a federal program nationwide with just a single lower-court victory.”

I’ve said from the start that my colleagues on the other side of the political aisle should join us to end this. If it was good enough for the Biden administration only a few months ago, it should make for bipartisan policy today.

One reason why consensus used to exist about this problem is that America was more than 180 years old before a district court judge imposed the first nationwide injunction in 1963. Since then, more than 130 nationwide injunctions have been issued.

While judges have used them against presidents of both parties, the Trump administrations have been disproportionately targeted far more than any other.

A Harvard Law Review study revealed more than half of nationwide injunctions ever issued came during Trump’s first four years in office. And in only the first few weeks of the current Trump term, federal judges issued more than 20 injunctions — surpassing what George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden received in their entire terms in office.

The result? Immigration enforcement, streamlining bureaucracy, ending discrimination in education, military preparedness – virtually every major Trump policy initiative has been halted by judicial blockade.

This is neither balanced jurisprudence nor an arcane legal dispute. It is lawfare waged from the bench that is confronting the Trump Administration and making increasingly unreasonable demands.

One district judge ordered a plane carrying illegal alien gang members bound for El Salvador to turn around midair. Another instructed the commander in chief exactly who he must enlist in the military. Yet a third demanded the Trump Administration pay contractors almost $2 billion in a single weekend, even though some invoices were flagged for fraud.