RIGHT SPEAK: Anti-Trump Groups Seek New Legal Strategies After Supreme Court Limits Injunctions; Trump Adversaries See Silver Linings in His ‘monumental’ Supreme Court Win

Anti-Trump groups seek new legal strategies after Supreme Court limits injunctions:

The Supreme Court’s earthquake ruling limiting judges’ authority to constrain the president with universal injunctions also pointed a way forward for President Trump’s opponents: class-action lawsuits.

Within hours of the 6-3 ruling Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union and other immigrant rights advocates filed the first class-action lawsuit to try to stop Mr. Trump’s changes to birthright citizenship from taking effect.

The groups said they were shifting legal tactics after the high court said universal injunctions were likely illegal. District judges have used universal injunctions to halt a president’s policies based on the briefest of arguments.

“The Constitution guarantees birthright citizenship, and no procedural ruling will stop us from fighting to uphold that promise,” said Tianna Mays, legal director for Democracy Defenders Fund, one of the groups that joined the ACLU in filing the challenge.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing the key opinion for the court’s ruling, said judges were becoming too imperious by delivering broad blockades on a president’s actions with little legal backing.

“These injunctions — known as ‘universal injunctions’ — likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to federal courts,” Justice Barrett wrote.

Mr. Trump called the ruling a “monumental” win.

“This brings back the Constitution,” he said.

Injunctions are blocks to action issued by courts. They are generally limited to the parties that are suing or have been sued.

In recent decades, though, federal judges have increasingly issued rulings that go beyond the parties in front of them. In the birthright citizenship cases, for example, the judges said their injunctions applied to every state and every child born to illegal immigrant or temporary migrant parents, even though it was Democratic-led states or immigration advocacy groups that brought the challenges.

Justice Barrett, in a ruling joined by the court’s other Republican appointees, said Congress never envisioned these injunctions when it created the lower courts and gave them jurisdiction to decide cases.

The high court’s three Democratic appointees vehemently dissented. They expressed concern about unchecked power and an unshackled president.

“No right is safe in the new legal regime the court creates,” wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law-abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship.”

The case exposed competing visions of the federal judiciary. To the court’s Republican appointees, judges are servants of the law entrusted to decide cases before them. The court’s Democratic appointees saw them more as legal warriors capable of thwarting the will of a president’s excesses. --->READ MORE HERE

Mehmet Eser/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images

Trump adversaries see silver linings in his ‘monumental’ Supreme Court win:

Class actions and other legal strategies may allow Trump’s opponents to keep pursuing broad blocks against at least some of his policies.

For Donald Trump, it was a “monumental victory.”

For the Trump resistance, there are signs of hope buried in the fine print.

Those dueling interpretations emerged Friday in the hours after the Supreme Court issued its blockbuster decision in Trump’s challenge to three nationwide injunctions that have blocked his attempt to deny citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants born on American soil.

And both contain an element of truth.

The 6-3 decision has a single headline holding: Federal district judges “lack authority” to issue “universal injunctions,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the conservative majority. It’s a breathtaking pronouncement given that district judges, with increasing frequency, have been issuing those sorts of injunctions for decades.

It was precisely the bottom-line result that Trump’s Justice Department asked for in the case. Sweeping injunctions have blocked many of Trump’s second-term initiatives, not just his executive order on birthright citizenship. Now, the Supreme Court has made clear, an injunction against a challenged policy should ordinarily apply only to the individuals or organizations who sued. For everyone else, the policy can take effect even if a district judge believes it’s likely illegal.

But Barrett’s 26-page opinion leaves a surprising degree of wiggle room. Yes, conventional nationwide injunctions are off the table, but Trump’s opponents say they see alternative routes to obtain effectively the same sweeping blocks of at least some policies that run afoul of the law and the Constitution.

The court appeared to leave open three specific alternatives: Restyle the legal challenges as class-action lawsuits; rely on state-led lawsuits to obtain broad judicial rulings; or challenge certain policies under a federal administrative law that authorizes courts to strike down the actions of executive branch agencies.

The viability of these three potential alternatives is not yet clear. But the court explicitly declined to rule them out. That led Justice Samuel Alito — who joined the majority opinion — to write a concurrence to raise concerns that the court was leaving loopholes that could undercut its main holding.

If lower courts permit litigants to exploit those loopholes, Alito wrote, “today’s decision will be of little more than minor academic interest.”

Legal experts were unsure about the practical implications of the ruling — especially in the birthright citizenship cases, but also in other challenges to Trump policies.

“One of the things that’s problematic about this decision is how difficult it will be to implement,” said Amanda Frost, a University of Virginia law professor whose scholarship was cited in the justices’ ruling. “I think it’s really hard to say.”