Name: 'A huge decision': Supreme Court limits ability of judges to stop Trump
Uploaded: 2025-06-27T15:43:06.000Z
Duration: 11 min 1 s
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This is a big win for President Trump because he has been railing against the so-called nationwide injunctions.

This is the power of a single judge to block an executive order for the entire country.

And this case came up as a result of multiple challenges to his effort to limit birthright citizenship through an executive order.

Now, here it appears that the justices are agreeing with Trump and limiting this power that judges have to block a policy for the entire country.

Now, on another issue, it does not appear that they have weighed in on whether Trump's effort to limit birthright citizenship is or is not constitutional.

Instead, they are limiting the power of these judges to block policies for the entire country, which will likely allow Trump to proceed with this effort to limit birthright citizenship while the larger constitutional questions about whether he can do that are being litigated.

Now, just to explain to you the significance of this, one of President Trump's lawyers told me this case, this is the ballgame for President Trump's agenda because we know more than any modern president, he loves to govern through executive action.

And the majority of these have been blocked by lower court judges.

So he has not been able to follow through with things he wanted to do on the budget, on mass firings, on immigration.

So now that the justices are limiting the power that judges have to block those policies, this is going to allow them to implement these policies more quickly, though it is possible that some of these might come before the justices in two or three years with constitutional concerns.

But right now, the question was really whether a single judge anywhere in the country could block an executive action for the entire nation.

And here, in a historic opinion, the justices are limiting that power.

And again, President Trump's lawyers have told me this is the case that they are watching.

This means everything for the president's ability to govern through executive actions.

Now, I will say, these nationwide injunctions, this is a bipartisan concern.

These have plagued every modern president.

But because President Trump does so much through executive action, he has faced the greatest number of these nationwide injunctions.

So he and his Republican allies here on Capitol Hill, they have been railing against these.

And now the conservative supermajority siding with President Trump and his Republican allies to limit this power from judges, a huge decision.

So just to be precise, Paula, this was a six to three decision, six conservative justices, three liberal justices.

And it was authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Now, some of her conservative colleagues did also opine concurrences here.

We're still getting through the whole opinion.

So these are just the top lines, but this is enormous.

This is yet another huge win for President Trump from this conservative supermajority.

Now, we have been reporting since Trump took office in January that his lawyers were telling me, even though a lot of their policies were getting bogged down in the lower courts, that anything they could get in front of this high court, that they would ultimately win.

And this decision right here, this is proof that this long game they've been playing for the past six or seven months, they've won and they've won big time.

We'll get back to you as you continue reading this opinion and we'll see what the final decision is with a lot more specific details.

He's over at the White House for us where they're watching very, very closely, probably more closely than any place else in the country right now, what the US Supreme Court is doing.

There's no question about that, Wolf, and exactly what Paula was saying there.

This is about something much broader than birthright citizenship.

Yes, that specific issue was the venue to get this to the Supreme Court.

That will likely be decided on a different day, but it is just the idea of this power of the executive branch that really is at issue here.

It's hard to think of another administration, and I've covered the last four or five presidents, I guess, that has used their executive authority as much, and it's been challenged by lower courts.

Now the Supreme Court is weighing in and it is giving the executive branch a considerable power.

One White House official, and they're reading through this opinion in the White House Counsel's Office, just as everyone else is, but is pointing to this line.

And Justice Amy Coney Barrett's opinion, it says this, when a court concludes that the executive branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power to.

So basically, if the executive branch has exceeded its authority, a judge cannot also weigh in, a singular judge.

So the White House is viewing this ruling as very consequential that could affect a variety of policies, a variety of cases that exist, really across the spectrum of what this administration has tried to do.

So there's no doubt, even though birthright citizenship was something the president long talked about, he campaigned on, this is bigger than that in a sense, because it is broader and it's answering a question, at least for the moment, about the power of the executive branch that many lower courts have raised into question.

Yeah, and obviously this impacts the power of the executive branch, but it impacts every single American as well.

And I think that's a big focus here, because I remember, Ali, during the oral arguments, one of the concerns brought up was, if judges can't do the nationwide injunction, then you have a patchwork, where the plaintiffs are under the injunction, but others in America wouldn't be under that.

And so that's really the question here, how does it address that issue?

Yeah, and in this case, in the birthright citizenship case, there was something like six different lawsuits filed in six different district courts.

This case is an amalgamation of three of them that went up to the Supreme Court.

So now they're gonna be back in the district courts.

That's where most of the action happens in the federal judiciary.

People who were born to parents who are not citizens could have different status in different districts at this moment.

I do wanna read to the point that Paula and Jeff were making.

This is a good sense of why this is so important.

It's on page five, written by Amy Coney Barrett.

She's writing for the Sixth Justice Conservative Majority, an expansion of presidential powers, a reduction in the powers of courts.

By the end of the Biden administration, we had reached a state of affairs where almost every major presidential action was immediately frozen by a federal district court.

As the number of universal injunctions has increased, so too has the importance of this issue.

And I think that's a nice encapsulation of why this is such a big win for the Trump administration.

And not just Donald John Trump, the person, but the office of the president.

Whoever comes next is going to get the benefit of this ruling too.

And it's going to make it much harder, not impossible, but much harder for a single district court judge in Maryland or Wyoming or where have you, to say, I'm blocking the president's action nationwide.

It's going to be much harder to do that now.

And isn't there a strategic victory, obviously, on behalf of the administration, back to those oral arguments that you were talking about, Pamela, by focusing this on the nationwide injunction issue and not the underlying birthright citizenship, which clearly does, I know every scholar says, it's not constitutional at its core, but does live on to fight another day and perhaps have some enforcement or enactment in the meantime.

And this is part, I've just started to sort of dig into the dissent, but this is part of what the three liberal justices say in dissent.

We're going to end up with a system where if you're born in New Jersey, you might have different status than if you're born in the exact same circumstances across the river in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia.

And so that's one of the problems here, the practical problems.

And again, important to stress, the dispute over birthright citizenship itself and Donald Trump's effort to not eliminate it, but narrow it, that's for another day.

That I think will make its way back to the Supreme Court, but not this term.

And I think, excuse me, I think that's actually one of the critical points.

I think it's premature to declare victory for the administration in this.

What this opinion is, is a full employment license for litigators.

Now, all of these cases go back to the lower courts.

The Supreme Court appears to have said, you can bring these cases as class actions.

You don't have to proceed individually, but class actions are a complicated question as well.

Now that it's consistent with the long game strategy, it was absolutely a strategic decision by the administration to bring it in this posture.

They've prevailed sort of initially in getting themselves more time to pursue this.

But it's not at all clear that this policy will succeed or ever actually be implemented.

It now depends what lower courts across the country do.

This is coming back to the Supreme Court, but first, more litigation over the coming year.

And Deborah Pearlstead is a constitutional law professor at Princeton University.