Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan once opposed the practice of district judges issuing national injunctions before siding with the court’s two other liberal justices in dissent to Friday’s ruling.
The 65-year-old justice vocally opposed the use of the procedure in 2022, during an interview at Northwestern Law School. She co-signed Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion alongside Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson against the court blocking a nationwide injunction on President Donald Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order in a 6-3 decision.
Kagan, speaking with Northwestern Law Dean Hari Osofsky, said “It just can’t be right that one district judge can stop a nationwide policy in its tracks and leave it stopped for the years that it takes to go through the normal process.” The justice attacked both nationwide injunctions and “forum shopping,” where litigants only take cases to the states and judges that will support them against the federal government, saying, “there’s no political tilt to it.”
“You look at something like that and you think, that can’t be right. In the Trump years, people used to go to the Northern District of California, and in the Biden years, they go to Texas,” Kagan said during the conversation.
The Supreme Court ruled that lower courts had exceeded their authority in using a nationwide block against President Donald Trump’s January executive order restricting birthright citizenship.
The dissent, authored by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, stated that the rule of law is “a precept of our democracy,” and that Trump’s executive order regarding birthright citizenship has “made a ‘solemn mockery’ of our Constitution.”
The administration now seeks to “promptly file” to end birthright citizenship, an amendment “made for the babies of slaves, not meant for people trying to SCAM the system and come into the country on vacation,” according to Trump during a press conference shortly after the ruling.
Many Democrats have opposed nationwide injunctions in the past, notably House Majority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, when American Lawyer and District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ruled in favor of a ban on the sale of mifepristone, a dangerous drug allegedly used in abortion pills.
Multiple decisions by the Supreme Court this term split along 6-3 lines, including a June 18 decision to uphold a Tennessee ban on sex-change procedures for minors and Friday’s decision to allow parents to opt-out their children from LGBTQ+ storybook lessons in schools.
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