Mr. President,
Today, 20 of my colleagues and I will introduce legislation to stop the abuse of universal injunctions we are seeing across our country. All [these injunctions are used] to stop the Trump agenda.
Universal injunctions violate the words of the Constitution that we read, that the courts can only hear “cases” or “controversies.” That’s a requirement of Article III of the Constitution...[injunctions] apply court orders to people not even party to the lawsuit.
So, the necessity for doing away with universal injunctions violating the “case and controversy” requirements.
Universal injunctions were almost unheard of for the first 175 years of our history, and only became common in the last decade.
In addition to being unconstitutional, they’re also anti-democratic. Universal injunctions have become a favorite tool for those seeking to obstruct President Trump’s agenda.
Individual district judges – who don’t even have authority over any of the other 92 district courts – are single-handedly vetoing policies the American people elected President Trump to implement.
Now, universal injunctions have been used against both Democrat and Republican administrations, since they have sprung up so numerously in the last few years. But in the past two months alone, judges have issued more universal injunctions against the Trump administration than President Biden faced throughout [his] entire four-year term.
By exercising power this way, the courts are doing great damage to the judicial process that they should be working to protect. And the Supreme Court could stop this whole process, but [it] has not taken such action.
It’s Congress’ job to legislate, so what would you expect? I’m introducing legislation to solve this problem.
My bill [will prevent] judges from providing non-party relief, make temporary restraining orders immediately appealable, and reset the separation of powers. In short, I’m trying to fix a bipartisan problem that has been plaguing Democratic and Republican administrations alike.
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