The Grassley Plan To Curb the Courts

Let us be among the first to endorse Senator Grassley’s bill to defuse the acrimony between our presidents and federal judges. Courts are erecting roadblocks to President Trump’s executive actions, and Mr. Trump is calling for judges to be impeached. Mr. Grassley’s bill seeks to put a stop to a legal tactic — nationwide injunctions — that federal judges have been deploying to thwart “energy in the executive.”The legislation is needed, per Mr. Grassley, because of federal district court judges like, say, James Boasberg, who is, as Mr. Trump puts it daintily, a “Radical Left Lunatic.” Such judges, Mr. Grassley reckons, have increasingly “inserted themselves” into policy debates. The senior senator from Iowa says that these judges “have repeatedly chosen not only to decide the cases before them, but also to issue orders derailing executive policy nationwide.”These injunctions — court orders to do, or to stop doing, something — have, in Mr. Grassley’s telling, “become a favorite tool for those seeking to obstruct Mr. Trump’s agenda.” In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, the senator notes that “more than two-thirds of all universal injunctions issued over the past 25 years were levied against the first Trump administration,” and at least 15 were issued in “the past two months alone.”That number of injunctions against Mr. Trump already exceeds, Mr. Grassley says, the number of such court orders that President Biden faced during his entire four-year presidency. Congressman Darrell Issa calls the ability of judges to issue these injunctions a “major malfunction” of the court system. Justice Samuel Alito has lamented “the unchecked power” of a federal judge who up and ordered Mr. Trump to release some $2 billion in aid.Confronted with the appearance of bias in the judicial branch — which is, as Chief Justice Roberts reminds, “a separate and coequal branch of government” — Mr. Trump has petitioned the Supreme Court to clip the wings of lower court judges. He asked the Nine to confine “injunctions to parties actually within the courts’ power,” as our A.R. Hoffman reports, which would mean that injunctions would henceforth be “local rather than nationwide.”Justice Neil Gorsuch decried nationwide injunctions as “a stratagem to ‘govern the whole Nation’ from one courtroom,” Mr. Hoffman reports. In 2018 Justice Clarence Thomas, in Trump v. Hawaii, called such injunctions “legally and historically dubious.” The Constitution grants to Congress the power to decide, and alter, how much authority the courts have on this head, via the authority “To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court.”Mr. Grassley points out that there is “no clear record” of nationwide injunctions before 1963. Since then, the court orders have bedeviled Democratic as well as Republican presidents. When a federal judge during President Biden’s tenure limited access to abortion medication, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez denounced “egregious overreaches by members of the judiciary appointed by a right-wing Republican Party.”When President Obama sought to legalize the status of millions of illegal immigrants, a federal district judge in 2015 halted the effort, contending that the commander in chief had exceeded his authority. Under Mr. Biden, federal judges used the nationwide injunctions to block Covid vaccine mandates for federal contractors, mask mandates on airplanes, and a presidential effort to halt deportations for illegal alien stepchildren and spouses.Plus, too, some six nationwide injunctions were imposed by federal judges during George W. Bush’s presidency. The GOP, though, could well come to miss the nationwide injunction if a Democrat returns to the White House. Even so, Mr. Grassley avers that “if the Supreme Court won’t act to rein in the lower courts, Congress must.” His Judicial Relief Clarification Act could help check the politicization of the courts that is impeding Mr. Trump’s agenda.

The Grassley Plan To Curb the Courts

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