Strategically, the government could enact a policy affecting a million people, be sued, lose, provide relief to the named plaintiffs, and then not appeal the decision. The upper courts never get the opportunity to make binding precedent, the lower courts do not get to extend relief to non-plaintiffs, and the government gets to enforce its illegal policies on the vast majority of people who did not (likely could not) sue.

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933

Justice Sotomayor dissents:

> Instead, the Government says, it should be able to apply the Citizenship Order (whose legality it does not defend) to everyone except the plaintiffs who filed this lawsuit.

If that’s the case, I’m curious if it could be fixed with a class action, so everyone (or everyone born in the US) is a plaintiff? If that’s legally a thing.

If you accept that framing, you accept many of that frames implications without even consciously processing them. This is one of the ways that consent is manufactured.

This ruling is stating that federal judges cannot rule that the law is blocking Trump. By accepting and adopting the frame that it is Trump vs Judges you implicitly accept that the law itself is a weapon rather than a boundary. It argues that the law is subjective, based on the judge ruling, rather than objective. It argues that there is no objective truth. To say it is judges and not the law that stops trump is to say that judges are agents of themselves and not agents of the law.

Agreeing that it is Judges vs Trump is implicitly agreeing that the law is arbitrary based on the judge ruling. Arbitrary government is authoritarian government.

The court’s decision to permit the executive to violate the constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law,” Jackson wrote. “Given the critical role of the judiciary in maintaining the rule of law … it is odd, to say the least, that the court would grant the executive’s wish to be freed from the constraints of law by prohibiting district courts from ordering complete compliance with the constitution.

This feels about as grim as the Citizens United dissent, which has been proven more and more true every day:

A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold.

I'm not particularly happy about nationwide injunctions, but this is much worse if you have a president who is not shy to "break the law now and fight it in court later". And now that Trump has shown the way, you can be sure future presidents will follow.

Another terrible outcome is that you then have federal orders applied differently from state to state (or more accurately, federal district to district). If you're in Nevada you won't get citizenship, but in Oregon you will.

This is right up there with the Presidential Immunity in terms of terrible decisions by this SCOTUS.

"No right is safe in the new legal regime the court creates. 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 majority holds that, absent cumbersome class-action litigation, courts cannot completely enjoin even such plainly unlawful policies unless doing so is necessary to afford the formal parties complete relief. That holding renders constitutional guarantees meaningful in name only for any individuals who are not parties to a lawsuit. Because I will not be complicit in so grave an attack on our system of law, I dissent."

Guess now not everyone has the same rights in America.

They can treat you how they wish unless you personally take it up. What next, personalised constitutions? rules for thee and not for me.

"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. (https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.htm)

It seems like it was ruled that instead of 1000, much more local, people able to protect constitutional rule with the force of the judiciary, we now have 9.

If you analyze only based on power changes, now fewer people have more power.

This ruling is idiotic even if you are generally opposed to nationwide injunctions. Birthright citizenship is a fundamental and clear cut right. Any attempts to overturn that must meet a high burden of justification. Temporarily suspending such attempts until the matter can firmly be decided causes the least amount of harm and should be allowed.

Oh but the high court of chancery in england! They didn't have them, so we can't either! Never mind that is 2025, we're a different nation, the federal government has a lot more power, and we have these injunctions for all of Biden's term and they had plenty of opportunity to stop them but said nothing when it was for protecting gun rights or denying women's healthcare.

You are secretly calm because you think it won't affect you.. until it does.

The US has a three-tiered judiciary that moves slowly, Congress has a very high threshold for impeachment and removal (and a slow process), and the order of succession is basically locked in for four years. The people are not easily moved to action, and it's doubtful how much they could realistically accomplish.

Universal injunctions were a Band-Aid fix, one of the very few avenues our system permitted for there to be any rapid institutional response to illegal and immediately harmful policy. But that is no more.

As an exercise, what happens if a president issues a "throw enemies in the woodchipper" executive order? How many hours or days would it take the other branches of government to legally nullify the order? (What they can do in practice is another question.)

It's an extreme example, but a future admin could use the current admin's reasoning to unilaterally confiscate guns and force you to be a plaintiff in federal court to get relief.

So, deporting people to a third-country (another decision SCOTUS allowed this term) has a simple balancing test: stay here and be fine or possibly deport a Chinese citizen to El Salvador, which could cause incredible harm. So even ignoring th elikelihood of how the issue is decided, the balancing test favors enjoining third-party deportation.

So in this case, we had a universal injunction against an executive order removing birthright citizenship. This fails on two fronts:

1. As justices noted, it's highly unlikely that the order will be held up as constitutional. There is case law on this. The language of the 14th amendment is clear. The exact issue was discussed at the time. This has no hope in a non-corrupt court of succeeding.

2. Given other decisions, bona fide US citizens could be deported to CECOT and detained indefinitely with no due process. So it should be stayed because of the potential harm.

What SCOTUS did today was say the order revoking birthright citizenship was unlikely to succeed but it allows the administration to proceed anyway while hte issue is litigated in the courts, which could take years.

That's how corrupt this court is.

People have been fed this propaganda that Supreme Court justices are apolitical legal scholars who come down from their tower to issue judgements and keep things in check. It couldn't be further from the truth. Supreme Court justices are political appointees that dress up their political positions in legalese.

Example 1: this court invented the "major questions doctrine" whereby the court decides a matter is large enough that the court gets to override both the administrative and legislative branches.

Example 2: they also invented the "historical traditions doctrine", which is used selectively. For example, abortion was completely legal 200+ years ago. Ben Franklin even published at-home instructions on how to perform an abortion [1].

Example 3: in the wake of the Civil War there was huge violence not from the freed slaves but from white people towards former slaves, most notably with the Colfax massacre. The Supreme Court went on a white supremacist tear during Reconstruction, notably gutting the federal government's ability to prosecute hate crimes like Colfax [2].

Example 4: The Tiney court in the 1850s made what is perhaps one of the worst decisions ever made (ie Dred Scott), arguing from a legal and constitutional perspective that black people weren't "people".

Example 5: the Roberts court decided that moeny equals speech, gutting any legislation around campaign spending, which is a big part of how we got here.

Example 6: the presidential immunity decision will go down in history as one of the 10 or even 5 worst decisions ever made. It completely invented far-reaching immunity that essentially made the president a king, in a country that was founded on the very idea of rejecting monarchs.

Example 7: in 1984, the Supreme Court decided that in any areas of ambiguity in legislation, trial courts should defer to the agency empowered by Congress to enforce that legislation. This is the so-called "Chevron deference".

More than 40 years passed through 7 presidents (4 Republican and 3 Democrat) where both parties at different times controlled Congress. Congress declined to legislate away Chevron deference despite having ample opportunity to do so. Moreso, they intentionally wrote legislation with Chevron deference in mind yet this court decided to reverse Chevron. Yet on other cases, the court has deferred to Congress's inaction as intent.

Fun fact: Chevron v Natural Resources Defense Council was previously known as Natural Resources Defense Council v. Gorsuch [3]. That's not a coincidence. The suit involved Reagan's head of dthe EPA, Anna Gorsuch, mother of current Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch, who was humiliated and ultimately fired from the EPA while trying to destroy it from within.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2022/05/18/1099542962/abortion-ben-frank...

[2]: https://www.theroot.com/what-was-the-colfax-massacre-1790897...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Resources_Defense_Coun...

Nationwide injunctions were saught and used by (self-proclaimed) conservatives to slow down and stop Biden immigration policies.

With the US Supreme Court strongly tilted toward all four, its an extremely difficult hole to climb out of.

I don't see a dictatorship (anytime soon). Not out of any abundance of optimism, but simply that all four of those constituencies and the Supreme Court's dominant wing itself, are highly aligned with each other, and would all lose out if it goes that far.

They can absolutely still strike down a law or executive branch policy.

This forces judges to actually do their job., instead of a nationwide injunction while they decide if they want to do their job later.

It doesn’t actually alter some fabric of our democracy or checks and balances, because the judges had already gone beyond what the constitution and congress prescribed.

Every issue that any partisan has with this country is because one branch isn’t doing their job.

The disruptive aspect of this - with concern to the birthright case that hasnt been ruled on yet - is just another example of this. Judges not doing their job.