District Judges Don't Rule the Union
The remedy for national executive overreach is not district court overreach.
In Trump v. CASA, Inc., the Supreme Court handed down a ruling that clipped the wings of district court judges—specifically their ability to issue nationwide injunctions. The case involved a challenge to a federal immigration policy, but its implications extend far beyond any one administration.
The case itself was about the controversial order by Trump to rescind birthright citizenship. The Court didn’t rule on the legality of that question but it did hold that district courts may not block a federal policy for the entire country unless doing so is the only way to grant full relief to the actual plaintiffs.
It wasn’t a ban on broader relief altogether, but it was a significant narrowing—one that resets the boundaries of judicial intervention in national policymaking. A district court can still block an unlawful rule, but the ruling will apply locally—unless the government can demonstrate that anything narrower would be unworkable. This, predictably, has been framed as creating “chaos and a dangerous patchwork of rights across the nation”. That this was the case to make this call is a separate question from whether the call was necessary.
Lest we forget the ruling comes after a two-decade period where such injunctions grew increasingly common. Under President George W. Bush, there were fewer than ten. During the Obama years, that number ticked up slightly. Under Trump, it exploded: over sixty nationwide injunctions were issued, mostly by liberal judges trying to halt conservative policies on immigration, health care, and regulation. When Biden took office, the same playbook flipped—conservative plaintiffs filed in carefully chosen jurisdictions, and judges began blocking progressive rules from coast to coast.
The Supreme Court’s decision acknowledges the political convenience of this tactic—and rejects it. A district court can still rule on the merits of a case and protect plaintiffs from unlawful policy, but it cannot dictate outcomes for people who aren’t before it. Exceptions remain for unusual situations, such as when a public nuisance affects people indiscriminately, but those will be rare and narrowly tailored. Relief, the Court emphasized, must be proportional to the parties harmed.
This decision is often being framed in partisan terms, but it addresses a structural problem that both parties have contributed to. The underlying issue isn’t judicial power—it’s the gradual collapse of legislative engagement. Congress has grown increasingly risk-averse. Faced with that vacuum, presidents—regardless of party—have filled the gap by ruling through executive order and administrative decree. What used to be policy proposals now come in the form of agency memos and regulatory guidance, often bypassing Congress altogether. The courts, in turn, became the last line of accountability—but in ways that weren’t always consistent with the constitutional design. Litigants didn’t need to win elections, build coalitions, or pass laws. They just had to file in the right district and hope a judge would block the entire policy. It turned governance into a race to the courthouse, and district judges into policymakers by proxy.
This feedback loop produced growing instability. A new administration would issue a rule, a judge would block it, the appellate court might disagree, and the Supreme Court would be forced to intervene—again and again. The result was not balance, but volatility. It created the illusion that the legal system could govern by itself, simply by handing more power to whichever side moved quickest.
The Court’s decision is a reminder that the legal system is not supposed to operate in isolation. In a healthy constitutional order, the president influences the agenda, with Congress handling the policymaking, subject to judicial review through cases that rise gradually through the courts. An injunction, when granted, should address the specific harm experienced by the plaintiff—not impose a sweeping freeze on an entire federal program.
What this means, in practical terms, is that future challenges to executive action will have to proceed with more care. The harder it is to undo federal policy unilaterally, the more incentive there is to enact it properly in the first place.
It also means that conservatives, who may be celebrating this decision today, should prepare for the limits it will impose tomorrow. The next progressive president may advance a bold redistribution plan or an aggressive regulatory regime by executive order. When that happens, a sympathetic judge may no longer be able to halt it nationwide. That is not a weakness of the system—it is the system doing what it’s supposed to do: pushing policymakers back toward the institutions designed to contain and balance their ambitions.
The long-term solution to executive overreach is not to arm district courts with matching power. It is to rebuild the role of Congress and reintroduce friction into the policymaking process. When a policy must pass through multiple layers of deliberation—when it must survive votes, amendments, veto threats, and public scrutiny—it gains legitimacy. And when that happens, courts are far less likely to strike it down or block it wholesale.
This case does not end the story. But it does close one of the more problematic chapters in how national policy has been made and unmade in recent years. It shifts power back to where it belongs—not in the hands of a single judge, and not solely in the hands of the president, but in the institutions that were designed to work together, however slowly, to shape the laws we live under.
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This is really informative and not at all polemical. Thank you!