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Floor Speech
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Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, today, 20 of my colleagues and I will introduce legislation to stop the abuse of universal injunctions that we are seeing all across the country--all of this to stop the Trump agenda.
Universal injunctions violate the words of the Constitution that we agreed that the courts can only hear ``case or controversy.'' And that is a requirement of article III of the Constitution because they apply court orders to people not even parties to the lawsuits--so the necessity for doing away with universal injunctions violating the ``case-or-controversy'' requirements.
Universal injunctions were almost unheard of for the first 175 years of our history and only became common in the last decade. In addition to being unconstitutional, they are also anti-democratic. Universal injunctions have become a favorite tool of those seeking to obstruct President Trump's agenda.
Individual district judges who don't even have authority over any of the other 92 district courts are singlehandedly vetoing policies the American people elected President Trump to implement.
Now, universal injunctions have been used against both Democrat and Republican administrations since they have sprung up so numerously in the last few years.
But in the past 2 months alone, judges have issued more universal injunctions against the Trump administration than President Biden faced throughout his entire 4-year term.
By exercising power this way, the courts are doing great damage to the judicial process that they should be working to protect, and the Supreme Court could stop this whole process, but the Supreme Court has not taken such action.
So it is Congress's job to legislate. So what would you expect? I am introducing legislation to solve this problem.
My bill prevents judges from providing nonparty relief, make temporary restraining orders immediately appealable, and reset the separation of powers. In short, I am trying to fix a bipartisan problem that has been plaguing both Democratic and Republican administrations alike. ______
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