AUSTIN (KXAN) — The U.S. Supreme Court issued an opinion Friday blocking lower courts from using universal or nationwide injunctions to stop the enforcement of federal rules and laws.
“Traditionally, courts issued injunctions prohibiting executive officials from enforcing a challenged law or policy only against the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. The injunctions before us today reflect a more recent development: district courts asserting the power to prohibit enforcement of a law or policy against anyone,” wrote Justice Amy Barrett in the opinion of the court.
The ruling could also spell an end to similar injunctions from conservative district court judges, such as U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk.
Based in Amarillo, Texas, Kacsmaryk has issued several universal injunction since his 2017 nomination to the court. Some of these intended to block federal policies, such as protections for transgender workers, the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of medications, and staffing minimums at nursing homes.
The Harvard Law Review’s April 2024 issue includes a chapter on these injunctions that opens with a rundown of several such rulings by Kacsmaryk.
“Drawing from the list of injunctions, this Chapter notes the increasing risk of politicizing the nationwide injunction and delegitimizing the courts, as plaintiffs proceed to cherry-pick judges to increase the likelihood of political outcomes or policy goals,” the author wrote.
The chapter also includes a chart of nationwide injunctions; between 2001 and 2023, 96 were issued, and 86.5% of those came from judges appointed by a president from the party opposite to the sitting president. During Biden’s term, all such injunctions came from Republican-appointed judges. During Trump’s first term, 92.2% of nationwide injunctions came from Democrat-appointed judges.
“Nationwide injunctions are becoming more common,” Harvard Law Review wrote. “District court judges appear to be striking down executive policies of opposing administrations with unprecedented frequency.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed many lawsuits seeking injunctions against the federal government’s rule making, which he called “rewrit[ing] federal law through undemocratic and illegal agency action.”
Texas judges produced “more than half” of all universal injunctions issued during the terms of former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, according to the chapter. During President George W. Bush’s term and Trump’s first term, most came from judges in California.
“Since the moment President Trump took office, low-level activist judges have been exploiting their positions to kneecap the agenda on which he was overwhelmingly elected. In fact, of the 40 nationwide injunctions filed against President Trump’s executive actions in his second term, 35 of them came from just five far-left jurisdictions: California, Maryland, Massachusetts, Washington, and the District of Columbia,” reads a White House email following Friday’s SCOTUS ruling.
Neither party seems happy to receive an universal injunction, but happy to utilize it as a check on the other party’s federal power. In 2023, Biden complained that Kacsmaryk was “completely out of bounds” for an injunction that blocked the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, an abortion medication.