The majority Republican House of Representatives voted to limit federal judges’ ability to issue nationwide injunctions blocking government policies. The vote ended in 219-213, largely along party lines, in favor of the “No Rogue Rulings Act,” a bill top Republican lawmakers are calling a priority due to many of Trump’s executive orders meant to crack down on immigration and downsize the government being blocked by judges.
The bill is now heading up to the Senate, where it will have a much harder time securing the 60 required votes with Republicans only having a 53-47 majority. The nationwide orders from judges that the bill hopes to lessen have risen over the past two decades in response to both Republican and Democratic administrations, prompting both parties to call for reform. However, this latest bill is only being introduced after judges in some of the 170+ lawsuits challenging Trump’s recent executive orders and initiatives began issuing a wave of rulings blocking the policies they considered unlawful or unconstitutional.
The day before the House of Representatives voted in favor of the bill, US Representative Darrell Issa, the bill’s lead Republican sponsor, had this to say on the matter: “Since President Trump has returned to office, left-leaning activists have cooperated with ideological judges whom they have sought out to take their cases and weaponized nationwide injunctions to stall dozens of lawful executive actions and initiatives.”
Under this bill, judges would be forced to limit the scope of their ruling to the specific parties before them, although nationwide orders could still be issued in class action lawsuits. Cases by two or more states would be heard by randomly assigned three judge panels, whose rulings could be appealed to the Supreme Court directly.
Republican Speaker Mike Johnson has touted the bill as an alternative to the idea of simply impeaching the judges who block Trump’s agenda, which has been shared by many of the president’s allies. On April 7th, Johnson went on Fox News, saying, “No one single activist judge should be able to issue a nationwide injunction to stop a president’s policies. That’s not the way the framers intended this to work, and we’re going to put them back in check.”
The bill was met with harsh criticism from Democrats, who called it an effort to change the rules so President Trump can break the law freely. At a committee hearing the previous week, Representative Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said, “The whole idea of suddenly blocking nationwide injunctions because Donald Trump is losing every single day in court defeats the whole concept of the rule of law.” Raskin further said that had the bill been law, it would have prevented Federal judges in Washington state, Massachusetts, and Maryland from blocking Trump’s executive order to restrict automatic birthright citizenship as part of his crackdown on immigration.
