Ongoing Judicial Coup Proves Alito, Thomas Were Right About Weak SCOTUS Injunction Ruling: Alito Predicted That the Court’s Decision Would ‘have very little value if district courts award relief to broadly defined classes without following “Rule 23’s procedural protections” for class certification.’

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Ongoing Judicial Coup Proves Alito, Thomas Were Right About Weak SCOTUS Injunction Ruling

Alito predicted that the court’s decision would ‘have very little value if district courts award relief to broadly defined classes without following “Rule 23’s procedural protections” for class certification.’

Less than five months ago, Associate Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas warned that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. CASA, limiting lower courts’ use of nationwide injunctions, failed to address loopholes open to abuse by left-wing activists and judges. And since the handing down of that ruling, the two senior justices have been proven right.

The issue of nationwide injunctions was front and center during a panel discussion at The Federalist Society’s annual National Lawyers Convention this past weekend. Titled, “Judicial Oversight of District Courts After CASA,” the conversation focused on the CASA decision and the ongoing judicial coup aimed at grinding President Trump’s administration to a halt.

While speaking on the panel, Yale Law School Professor E. Garrett West praised the Supreme Court’s CASA decision as “a brilliant vindication of the formalist argument that says universal injunctions are totally impermissible” under America’s constitutional framework. However, he noted, “the bad news is that it practically will make almost no difference with respect to the functional problems created by the universal injunction.”

“The reason it will make probably no difference at all or hardly any difference at all is because there are so many alternative mechanisms for plaintiffs who are motivated to get something like a universal injunction to go get one,” West said.

West went on to highlight several of these key loopholes, including the issue of class action certification. As described by the Yale Law School professor, “[I]f there are enough of the [class] members, they can ask for complete relief from a particular court, and the injunction might be basically just as broad as it would have been if it had been a universal injunction.”

West also noted the issue of associational standing, wherein “nonprofits can bring claims on behalf of their members asserting injuries to their members, and if they have enough members, it might be broad enough that the injunction is effectively a universal injunction.” He also raised the question of claims by state governments, in which states that are suing the federal government and alleging “some kind of financial injury … come up with a theory for why it’s the case that the court has to completely enjoin the policy to give complete relief to the states.”

As previously alluded to, this isn’t the first time such problems have been raised. In fact, Alito and Thomas underscored many of these same issues in a concurring opinion the former authored in the Supreme Court’s CASA decision.

While joining the court’s majority opinion, Alito (joined by Thomas) wrote separately “to note two related issues that are left unresolved and potentially threaten the practical significance of today’s decision: the availability of third-party standing and class certification.”

“Today’s decision only underscores the need for rigorous and evenhanded enforcement of third-party-standing limitations. The Court holds today that injunctive relief should generally extend only to the suing plaintiff,” Alito wrote. “That will have the salutary effect of bringing an end to the practice of runaway ‘universal’ injunctions, but it leaves other questions unanswered.”

The George W. Bush appointee posed a hypothetical question about what would happen if a state were to be granted third-party standing in a suit, and whether any prospective injunctive relief would extend to “all residents of that State.” If such a standard were to be applied, he reasoned, then states would become emboldened to “bring third-party suits on behalf of their residents” to obtain broader “relief than any individual resident could procure in his own suit.”

“Left unchecked, the practice of reflexive state third-party standing will undermine today’s decision as a practical matter,” Alito wrote. --->READ MORE HERE

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