Can a single judge unilaterally thwart the president of the United States?
That’s the contentious question the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to resolve last week in response to court orders blocking its effort to curtail birthright citizenship, and after a slew of decrees requiring the president do everything from halting major actions on DEI and domestic spending to disbursing billions in foreign aid.
At issue is a legal remedy, universal injunctions, that allows any of the nearly 700 federal judges to prevent the president from enforcing policies not only against those bringing a case but anyone, everywhere. Universal injunctions were rare until the first Trump administration, when their usage exploded as Democrats and progressives turned to the courts to block many of his policies.
In the early days of Donald Trump’s second administration, courts have issued such injunctions at a historic pace and with growing potency, notably over the weekend with a suspension in deportations of Venezuelan gang members without a hearing. During the month of February alone, district court judges, most nominated by Democrats, ordered 15 such injunctions – more than Joe Biden faced during his first three years as president. Courts from Washington, D.C., to Washington State have issued injunctions in “epidemic proportions,” now not only governing “the whole nation” but “the whole world,” the administration says.
The injunctions come in response to the 100-plus lawsuits that, critics argue, blue states, progressive nonprofits, and ex-government officials have deliberately brought before sympathetic judges – a tactic known as “forum shopping” or “judge shopping” that both parties have employed.
Democrats and progressive legal scholars argue these injunctions are a necessary brake because Trump is creating what they call a constitutional crisis by pushing the bounds of his office. “Thankfully,” Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Democrat Dick Durbin has said, “the judiciary is performing its duty to check the executive.”
The universal injunctions ordered so far have not only hamstrung the president but raised myriad legal and practical questions, some of which the administration raised in its applications to stay the birthright citizenship injunctions filed last week. These include whether a court’s authority is limited to ruling on cases and controversies concerning the parties before it; if it’s reasonable for the federal government to have to “run the table over months of litigation in multiple courts of appeals to have any chance of implementing” its policies; and to what extent the Supreme Court wishes to see conflicting circuit court opinions as to universal injunctions’ legitimacy persist.
So far, the nation’s highest court has been unwilling to resolve these questions, despite past pleadings from Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch and the Biden administration. The Supremes’ reticence was brought into stark relief earlier this month when a 5-4 majority issued a one-page opinion involving a D.C. district court’s universal injunction halting the Trump administration’s “pause” on foreign assistance. The ruling neither grappled with the merits of the case nor the ability of the trial judge, Amir Ali, to, in critics’ eyes, micromanage a president.
Alito 'Stunned'
In a blistering, seven-page-plus dissent, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that he was “stunned” that the court’s majority had asserted that "a single district court judge" has “the unchecked power to compel the Government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever) 2 billion taxpayer dollars.”
The court's reluctance to weigh in as such cases have worked their way through the lowers courts has left all three branches of government in limbo, and increasingly at each other's throats. As the Trump administration accused “liberal district court judges” of “abusing their power” to unilaterally block the president’s basic executive authority, frustrated congressional Republicans are moving to pass legislation to curtail universal injunctions while making it harder to “judge shop.” Some are even pursuing the more extreme measure of impeaching judges perceived to have overstepped their authorities – recently drawing the ire of at least two federal circuit court judges.
The dueling clashes between Democrats and a president they see as overreaching in pursuit of his agenda, and Republicans and a judiciary they see as overreaching while the Supreme Court sits idly by, come months after Chief Justice John Roberts issued a report hailing judicial independence and fretting over purported threats to it.
The 'No Rogue Rulings Act of 2025'
Scholars differ over when courts first started issuing universal injunctions, some dating them back to the Progressive Era and others to the 1960s. Congress’s concern with such decrees appears to have begun escalating during the first Trump administration – when their usage exploded – with panels in both houses holding hearings on the practice.
No matter what the Supreme Court decides in the case brought by the Trump administration, congressional Republicans are addressing the issue.
On March 5, the day Alito issued his dissent, Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican, brought his “No Rogue Rulings Act of 2025” before the House Judiciary Committee. The legislation would prohibit district courts from issuing injunctive relief beyond the party seeking it in court.
Issa argued that while Democrat and Republican presidents have both been stymied by universal injunctions, none has found himself nearly as constrained as Trump. He spoke while introducing his bill flanked by a chart showing the number of decrees issued against each administration from that of George W. Bush onward.
According to an April 2024 Harvard Law Review article, courts slapped the first Trump administration with 64 universal injunctions, more than half of all such injunctions entered between 1963 and 2023 – that is, over six decades. Democrat-nominated judges issued 92% of these orders.
In notable instances, the 45th president prevailed on appeal – as in Trump v. Hawaii, a case overturned at the Supreme Court concerning his executive order restricting travel from nations posing terror threats – but often only after months of litigation.
Justice Clarence Thomas laid out his argument against the use of universal injunctions in a concurrence in that 2018 case, calling them “legally and historically dubious” and “inconsistent with longstanding limits on equitable relief and the power of Article III courts.”
“If federal courts continue to issue them, this Court is dutybound to adjudicate their authority to do so,” Thomas concluded – a position Justice Gorsuch, too, would adopt.
The first Trump administration would oppose their usage in public remarks and official guidance, but the court never took up the question, and the injunctions persisted. Ranking Judiciary Committee Democrat Jamie Raskin shot back at Issa over the chart that “the implication … is that somehow the courts have done something wrong rather than Donald Trump having done something wrong.”
The courts have targeted Trump, Raskin argued, “because he is trampling the lawmaking and spending powers of the Congress of the United States. He’s violating the Civil Service Rights of federal workers. And he’s betraying the federal law in every particular way.”
Advocates of such injunctions contend that, beyond constraining an overreaching executive, by covering non-parties to a case, they protect those who might lack the resources to bring suit; reduce needless litigation; and are at times practically necessary, while promoting uniformity.
Raskin, who voted against the legislation alongside his fellow Democrats, did not respond to RCI’s inquiries in connection with this story.
The Biden administration took a different position when courts issued universal injunctions against its favored policies. In December 2024 it asked the Supreme Court to stay one such injunction halting enforcement of the Corporate Transparency Act. Therein, the departing president endorsed both Thomas’s and Gorsuch’s criticisms of the practice, and called on the Court to consider ruling on their legality. It did not.
Issa’s bill passed out of committee with an amendment permitting a three-judge panel to issue a universal injunction should a case be brought by two or more states located in different circuits. He characterized this as a “middle ground, something that’s fair” to protect presidents, regardless of party.
He anticipates his bill will come to the House floor “relatively quickly” and pass.
Hours after the markup, Republican Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley of Iowa took to the Senate floor to express concern about “some of the recent orders from individual district judges, issued on an expedited basis with very broad nationwide impact.”
In a statement to RealClearInvestigations, Sen. Grassley said, “Allowing a single district judge to unilaterally micromanage the executive branch should raise eyebrows, to say the least. I have serious questions about district courts’ recent use of [generally non-appealable] temporary restraining orders [which Justice Alito argued deserved scrutiny] and universal injunctions to put a leash on the executive branch, and I think Congress ought to closely examine the issue.”
Grassley’s committee colleague, Utah Republican Mike Lee, is working on a bill to curtail the practice. “The Constitution empowers Congress to address this issue by limiting jurisdiction and, in some cases, through impeachment," Senator Lee said. "I am drafting legislation to establish a [three-judge] panel that would expedite Supreme Court review of such blanket injunctions.”
Checkered History of Reform
Whether and to what extent a bill to curtail injunctions can pass through the Senate is unclear, though Rep. Issa told RCI he was optimistic. Similar legislation has languished in past Congresses – though notably, federal law called for three-judge panels to preside over cases dealing with injunctions against federal statutes until its repeal in the 1970s.
Democrats and Republicans alike have also previously sponsored legislation aimed at combatting the related practice of forum- or judge-shopping, only for those bills to die. While considered a “first cousin” to the issue of nationwide injunctions, Issa said there will be legislation forthcoming to deter it. He touted a companion bill that would require disclosure of third-party funding of cases.
The California congressman also told RCI he would be raising matters of judiciary reform before the Judicial Conference of the United States – which held its biannual meeting Tuesday – while noting that he believed Attorney General Pam Bondi would be making a similar pitch.
The Justice Department did not respond to RCI’s inquiries in connection with this story.
The conference, chaired by Justice Roberts, meets twice per year to “consider administrative and policy issues affecting the federal court system, and to make recommendations to Congress concerning legislation involving the Judicial Branch.”
The organization, which has previously issued nonbinding guidelines concerning judge shopping, Rep. Issa says, may serve as a venue to “fix some of these things sooner rather than later.”
For its part, the Trump administration recently availed itself of its own tool to “ensur[e] the democratic process remains intact by curbing activist judges and holding litigants accountable.”
It published a memorandum last Tuesday requiring parties seeking injunctions against it to “cover the costs and damages incurred if the Government is ultimately found to have been wrongfully enjoined or restrained.” This, it has argued, would “deter frivolous litigation” by creating risks for “[a]ctivist groups” filing “meritless lawsuits.”
The White House did not respond to RCI’s inquiries in connection with this story.
A March 13th order from U.S. District Court Judge James Bredar in Maryland illustrated the limits of this effort. In directing the administration to reinstate federal workers fired across 18 agencies, Bredar imposed an injunction bond of a mere $100 per plaintiff.
One Sen. Lee aide has indicated that Congress could look to pass legislation, perhaps as part of a package limiting universal injunctions, to ensure injunction bonds meet certain standards – a law that would presumably combat judicial efforts to demand artificially small bonds.
Musk: 'A Wave of Judicial Impeachments'
Injunctions aside, as Sen. Lee suggests, there is a more extreme remedy for taking on justices whose jurisprudence is perceived to be beyond the pale: impeachment.
Elon Musk has called for an “immediate wave of judicial impeachments, not just one,” as he put it, in a quote tweet referencing D.C. District Judge John D. Bates. The judge had ordered federal health agencies to restore certain pages removed from their websites pursuant to President Trump’s executive order on “gender ideology and extremism.”
Some GOP House members concur. They have introduced articles of impeachment against Bates, one of three such judges threatened with the ultimate sanction, generally on grounds of abuse of judicial power.
Another is Judge Paul Engelmayer, a Southern District of New York judge who originally prohibited President Trump’s chosen personnel – from DOGE staffers to senior appointees, including even Secretary Scott Bessent himself – from accessing Treasury Department payment systems.
D.C. District Judge Amir Ali is the third judge to have been hit with articles of impeachment to date. He issued the temporary restraining order halting the administration’s foreign aid pause that drew the rebuke of the Supreme Court’s minority.
With his weekend directive halting President Trump's effort to remove Tren de Aragua gang members from the U.S. via invocation of the wartime Alien Enemies Act, Chief Judge of the D.C. District Court James Boasberg is poised to join his colleagues as the fourth judge to face articles of impeachment this year. Hours after Chief Judge Boasberg issued his directive, House Judiciary Committee member Brandon Gill, a Republican from Texas, announced on X that he would be filing such articles this week.
Republican Congressman Andrew Clyde of Georgia told RCI, “If any judge can weaponize their power to usurp the president’s legitimate Article II authority and defy the will of the American people, then we no longer have a constitutional Republic.”
In response, he and GOP Reps. Eli Crane of Arizona and Andy Ogles of Tennessee, sponsors of such articles of impeachment, have launched a Judicial Activism Accountability Task Force. “We encourage members who are passionate about ending abusive judicial overreach, upholding the separation of powers, and defending the U.S. Constitution to join our effort,” Rep. Clyde added.
Congress has impeached only 15 federal judges in U.S. history, convicting eight – almost always on grounds of corruption. Three left the federal bench before impeachment proceedings concluded.
Despite the rarity of such efforts, Rep. Crane told RCI, “Our Founders gave us the power to impeach, and we cannot take stands based on what the Senate is allegedly going to do. We owe it to the American people to use every tool at our disposal.”
Following the Judicial Conference’s biannual meeting, it hosted a call with reporters in which two circuit court judges, Jeffrey Sutton and Richard Sullivan, condemned these efforts.
“Threats to judges are threats to judicial independence,” Sutton said, acknowledging the calls for impeachment. “One thing worth keeping in mind is if we dilute the standards for impeachment, that’s not just a problem for judges, that’s a problem for all three branches of government.”
Sullivan added that “Impeachment is not – shouldn’t be – a short circuiting of th[e judicial] process, and so it is concerning if impeachment is used in a way that is designed to do just that.”
Clyde told RCI that beyond impeachment, “I certainly think other remedies to combat judicial activism are worth pursuing, and I anticipate that’s an avenue our task force will explore.”
While myriad cases make their way through the courts, Democrats have suggested the Trump administration is going to lose patience and seek out a more dramatic showdown.
Chairman Grassley’s remarks on the Senate floor came in response to a speech from Ranking Member Durbin regarding a resolution calling on the Senate to affirm “the rule of law and the legitimacy of judicial review.”
The Illinois senator and other Democrats insinuated, based on recent remarks from the president, vice president, and others in and around the administration, that it might defy a court order, necessitating the resolution.
In a rejoinder, Grassley argued that Democrats had “repeatedly threatened the court for ruling in ways that they did not like” and remained mum while President Biden flouted the Supreme Court in response to its positions on policies like the CDC eviction moratorium, student loan debt relief, and affirmative action.
“Now that we have a Republican President, my Democratic colleagues appear to have a newfound respect for the courts,” Grassley said, calling Durbin’s resolution “nothing but a partisan messaging statement.”
In a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Thursday, Grassley defended the Trump administration, noting:
In the few weeks since he’s been in office, President Trump has been overwhelmed by decisions from individual district judges that encroach on his core constitutional powers. Nevertheless, he and his administration have worked diligently to abide by those orders, no matter how outrageous, by appealing them and challenging their scope and reach. And the President has been explicit about his views. He’s said, “I always abide by the courts, always abide by them. And we’ll appeal.”
Nevertheless, invoking the Dred Scott decision and other landmark decisions, the chairman noted, “Our history teaches that, in extreme cases, there may even be grounds to defy a court decision.”
Just days later, it appeared to some that such an extreme case might have arisen.
Critics of the Trump administration and many in the media were quick to claim it had defied D.C. District Chief Judge Boasberg's Saturday universal injunction halting the president's Tren de Aragua deportation effort. That's because several hundred members of the designated terrorist organization, apprehended and ticketed for deportation to El Salvador pursuant to the policy, landed there reportedly hours after Chief Judge Boasberg issued his directive — and despite his oral demands in a hearing just prior that any such flights be turned around.
In a notice to the court on Sunday, the administration indicated the members "had already been removed from U.S. territory" when the order came down. Citing this point, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt would issue a statement indicating that "The Administration did not ‘refuse to comply’ with a court order. ... The written order and the administration’s actions do not conflict."
"Moreover, as the Supreme Court has repeatedly made clear — federal courts generally have no jurisdiction over the President’s conduct of foreign affairs, his authorities under the Alien Enemies Act, and his core Article II powers to remove foreign alien terrorists from U.S. soil and repel a declared invasion. A single judge in a single city cannot direct the movements of an aircraft carrier full of foreign alien terrorists who were physically expelled from U.S. soil,” she added.
The administration would formally argue that Chief Judge Boasberg's order constitutes a "massive, unauthorized imposition" and "unprecedented intrusion upon the Executive's authority" in an emergency court filing that same day. Consistent with Chairman Grassley's remarks, it came in a motion to stay the order — while the president appeals it, and, per his administration's notice, as it uses other unchallenged authorities to target Tren de Aragua.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has called on the plaintiffs in the birthright citizenship cases to file their responses to the administration by April 4th.
