Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said his most recent legislation is meant to keep judges in their branch of government instead of veering into “policymaking.”
Nearly two weeks have passed since Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued a ruling prohibiting deportation flights while he oversees a case involving five immigrants with active deportation orders. The Trump administration went through with deportations, as planes were already airborne when Boasberg’s ruling came out, but flights have been paused ever since. Now, Grassley, 91, is about to introduce legislation to stop an injunction like this in the future.
“We would limit the injunction that a judge could do to his district and to the parties before the court, as opposed to a national injunction that would apply to the other 92 districts around the United States. This would keep judges from being policymakers,” Grassley said on Fox News’s America Reports Tuesday. We need to have judges do ‘case and controversy’ — those are words from the Constitution — and not deal with policymaking. And not have one of 700 district judges make a decision to apply throughout the United States. We should have bipartisan support for this.”
President Donald Trump is being hit harder than his predecessors with universal injunctions, Grassley said. He pointed out in an opinion editorial that “[m]ore than two-thirds of all universal injunctions issued over the past 25 years were levied against the first Trump administration.” While Trump is now only halfway to his 100-day mark, “judges have issued at least 15 universal injunctions against the administration—surpassing the 14 President Biden faced throughout his four-year term.”
Support for this matter could go as high as the Supreme Court. Justice Elena Kagan voiced her opinion against universal injunctions in 2022 at a Northwestern University event.
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“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,” Kagan said at the time.
Despite Grassley’s efforts to limit judges’ power, he disagreed with Trump about impeaching Boasberg simply over a legal disagreement.