SCOTUS Rejects Universal Injunctions, Opening Door for Broader Enforcement of Birthright Citizenship Order

Few ideas depart more dramatically from our constitutional design than the notion that a single district judge can dictate national policy from the bench, as universal injunctions purport to allow. With 94 federal judicial districts, this practice invites forum shopping on an industrial scale: opponents of an administration can file in every district, needing only one favorable ruling to paralyze federal policy, while the administration must prevail everywhere. That’s not how courts are supposed to function. It turns judges into policymakers, undermines the separation of powers, and stretches judicial authority well beyond the "cases or controversies" the Constitution permits.

     Although the Supreme Court granted review to address universal injunctions, the lower courts justified their orders only by reaching the merits—specifically, whether the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause mandates automatic citizenship for all children born on U.S. soil, regardless of parental status. That’s why Lex Rex Institute attorney Alexander Haberbush, partnering with Dr. John Eastman, on behalf of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, briefed the birthright citizenship issue directly. The brief provided the Court with the correct, originalist understanding of the Citizenship Clause while also making clear that the case could be resolved on the narrower question of universal injunctions alone. You can read that brief here.

     In Trump v. CASA, Inc., the Court did just that. Granting partial stays, it held that “universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts.” Justice Barrett, writing for the majority, reminded the lower courts that equitable relief was historically “party specific,” and that nationwide injunctions “were conspicuously nonexistent for most of the Nation’s history.” Responding to Justice Jackson’s dissent, Barrett noted, “Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary”—a position “at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself.” The Court rightly rejected this ahistorical practice. The deeper constitutional question remains: when the Court does take it up, the Constitution’s original meaning will not support the modern theory of unrestricted birthright citizenship.

CCJ Amicus Brief.

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