While Republican lawmakers continue to call for impeaching judges who block President Donald Trump’s agenda, Congress has another tool it could use to prevent judges from overriding executive authority.
Limiting courts’ ability to issue nationwide injunctions, which district judges use to block policies across the entire country, could become a strategy for Republicans looking to rein in what the Trump administration is slamming as an abuse of power by the judiciary.
“The Supreme Court should have addressed the issue of nationwide injunctions a decade ago,” South Texas College of Law professor Josh Blackman told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “But the Court keeps kicking the can down the road. Congress should take a close look at how to ensure courts are properly exercising their jurisdiction.”
Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley said Thursday that he would introduce legislation to “stop the abuse” of judicial authority through nationwide injunctions. California Rep. Darrell Issa has already introduced similar legislation, which was voted out of the House Judiciary Committee 14-9 in early March.
Issa’s No Rogue Rulings Act of 2025 would limit judges to only issuing injunctions that apply to parties in the case, rather than the entire country.
“We have a crisis on the bench right now and not just with this or any single judge,” Issa said in a statement Wednesday, adding that his bill is “the comprehensive solution we need to ensure that this problem does not occur anywhere in our federal judiciary and resets the proper and appropriate balance in our courts.”
Nationwide injunctions put the over 670 district court judges “temporarily on a par with the Supreme Court of the United States because each one can halt a practice nationwide unless and until a higher court revises, reverses, or vacates its order or Congress modifies the underlying substantive law,” Heritage Foundation legal scholars Paul Larkin and GianCarlo Canaparo wrote on Friday.
“Unless and until Congress endorses that practice, the federal courts should limit the reach of their judgments to the parties to a lawsuit,” they argued.
The Trump administration urged the Supreme Court last week to evaluate lower courts’ use of nationwide injunctions, asking the justices to limit rulings that prevented his executive order on birthright citizenship from taking effect nationwide.
“District courts have issued more universal injunctions and TROs [temporary restraining orders] during February 2025 alone than through the first three years of the Biden Administration,” Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris wrote in the application. “That sharp rise in universal injunctions stops the Executive Branch from performing its constitutional functions before any courts fully examine the merits of those actions, and threatens to swamp this Court’s emergency docket.”
Several Supreme Court justices have previously expressed opposition to the practice. During oral arguments for a challenge to the abortion pill in 2024, Justice Neil Gorsuch criticized “a rash of universal injunctions.”
Nearly two-thirds of all nationwide injunctions issued since 2001 were against the first Trump administration, according to a Harvard law review article published in June 2024, which does not include data from his second term. Nearly 92% of those rulings were issued by Democrat-appointed judges.
University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds included restrictions on nationwide injunctions among his suggestions for addressing the problem of overstepping judges in a Substack post Wednesday, noting pushing for impeachment is “a symbolic and probably self-destructive gesture.”
“Impeachment is hard, there’s no way the Republicans will get 2/3 of the Senate to vote for removal, and history suggests — from Bill Clinton through two different attempts on Donald Trump — that failed impeachment efforts leave their targets stronger, not weaker,” he wrote.
Chief Justice John Roberts issued a statement Tuesday after Trump called for impeaching a judge who ruled against him. Obama-appointed Judge James Boasberg ordered the administration on Saturday to halt flights carrying members of the Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang after Trump used the Alien Enemies Act to initiate their deportation.
“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts said.
Republican Texas Rep. Brandon Gill introduced articles of impeachment against Boasberg on Tuesday.
Several other Republican lawmakers have introduced similar resolutions to impeach other federal judges, including Paul Engelmayer, who restricted the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from accessing Treasury Department records; John McConnell Jr., who blocked Trump’s funding freeze; Amir Hatem Mahdy Ali, who blocked the administration from implementing its foreign aid spending freeze; and John Bates, who ordered health agencies to restore information removed from their websites.
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