mmdwi
AG William Barr demands end to nationwide injunctions empowering lone ‘sympathetic’ judges
Attorney General William Barr is calling for an end to nationwide injunctions, which have become recurrent obstacles in the way of President Trump’s agenda.
With the frequency of judges’ orders blocking the enforcement of federal laws and policies on the rise, Barr’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal escalates the Justice Department’s fight to check this facet of the judicial branch’s power.
Nationwide injunctions, he wrote, “create an unfair, one-way system in which the democratically accountable government must fend off case after case to put its policy into effect, while those challenging the policy need only find a single sympathetic judge.”
Barr alluded to the framers of the Constitution, asserting they never intended the courts to “act as a ‘council of revision’ with sweeping authority to reach beyond concrete controversies and rule on the legality of actions taken by the political branches.”
The rising number of injunctions have affected both Democratic and Republican administrations, but opponents of the Trump administration have accelerated the use of the procedural device. Barr said there were only 20 national injunctions during the eight-year Obama administration, while there have already been roughly 40 in the two-and-a-half years Trump has been in office.
“Shrewd lawyers have learned to ‘shop’ for a sympathetic judge willing to issue such an injunction,” Barr said. “These days, virtually every significant congressional or presidential initiative is enjoined — often within hours — threatening our democratic system and undermining the rule of law.”
Last year Barr’s predecessor, Jeff Sessions, released a memo to DOJ litigators with guidelines for arguing against the issuance of nationwide injunctions that halt executive branch actions as legal battles play out in the courts.
Excerpt