A divided U.S. Supreme Court ruled that individual judges lack the authority to grant nationwide injunctions, but the decision left unclear the fate of President Donald Trump’s restrictions on birthright citizenship.
The court is issuing decisions on the final six cases left on its docket for the summer, including those that are emergency appeals relating to Trump’s agenda.
Cases on the court’s emergency docket are handled swiftly, and decisions often come without explanations of the justices’ reasoning.
Decisions released today will be related to appeals on birthright citizenship, an online age verification law in Texas, the Education Department’s firing of nearly 1,400 workers and DOGE-related government job cuts.
Here’s the latest:
Key part of Obamacare coverage requirements preserved
The Supreme Court rejected a challenge from Christian employers to a key part of the Affordable Care Act’s preventive health care coverage requirements, which affects some 150 million Americans.
The 6-3 ruling comes in a lawsuit over how the government decides which health care medications and services must be fully covered by private insurance under former President Barack Obama’s signature law, often referred to as Obamacare.
The Trump administration defended the mandate before the court, though the Republican president has been critical of his Democratic predecessor’s law.
Nationwide injunctions have become a favored judicial tool during Trump presidency
A Supreme Court opinion limiting the use of nationwide injunctions takes aim at a judicial maneuver that has soared in popularity during the first several months of Trump’s second term.
A Congressional Research Service report identified 25 cases between Jan. 20 and April 29 in which a district court judge issued a nationwide injunction. Those include cases on topics ranging from federal funding to diversity, equity and inclusion considerations to birthright citizenship, the subject at issue in Friday’s Supreme Court opinion restricting their use.
That number is in contrast to 28 nationwide injunction cases that CRS identified from former President Joe Biden’s administration and 86 from Trump’s first term.
The report cautions that it’s not possible to provide a full count since nationwide injunction is not a legal term with a precise meaning.
Sotomayor accuses the Trump administration of “gamesmanship” in dissent
She wrote that Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order has been deemed “patently unconstitutional” by every court that examined it.
So, instead of trying to argue that the executive order is likely constitutional, the administration “asks this Court to hold that, no matter how illegal a law or policy, courts can never simply tell the Executive to stop enforcing it against anyone,” Sotomayor wrote.
“The gamesmanship in this request is apparent and the Government makes no attempt to hide it,” she wrote. “Yet, shamefully, this Court plays along.”
Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined her in her dissenting opinion.
Attorney general applauds limits on nationwide injunctions
“Today, the Supreme Court instructed district courts to STOP the endless barrage of nationwide injunctions against President Trump,” U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a post on the social platform X shortly after the ruling came down.
Bondi said the Justice Department “will continue to zealously defend” Trump’s “policies and his authority to implement them.”
Universal injunctions have been a source of intense frustration for the Trump administration amid a barrage of legal challenges to his priorities around immigration and other matters.
Nationwide injunctions limited, but fate of birthright citizenship order unclear
The outcome was a victory for Trump, who has complained about individual judges throwing up obstacles to his agenda.
But a conservative majority left open the possibility that the birthright citizenship changes could remain blocked nationwide. Trump’s order would deny citizenship to U.S.-born children of people who are in the country illegally.
Birthright citizenship automatically makes anyone born in the United States an American citizen, including children born to mothers in the country illegally. The right was enshrined soon after the Civil War in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor is reading her dissenting opinion from the bench, a sign of her clear disagreement with the majority’s opinion.
The other big cases left on the docket
The court seems likely to side with Maryland parents in a religious rights case over LGBTQ+ storybooks in public schools, but other decisions appear less obvious.
The judges will also weigh a Texas age-verification law for online pornography and a map of Louisiana congressional districts, now in its second trip to the nation’s highest court.
The justices will take the bench at 10 a.m.
Once they’re seated, they’ll get right to the opinions.
The opinions are announced in reverse order of seniority so that the junior justices go first. The birthright citizenship case will likely be announced last by Chief Justice John Roberts.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
