Nationwide Injunctions

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I rise today to talk about two separate issues that seem to be confusing in our current climate at this point.

The first of those is something called nationwide injunctions. Now, for folks that don't track this issue of nationwide injunctions, they have no idea what this means. I would tell you it is a fairly recent thing.

We have three branches of government. Any civics student in middle school knows that. We have the legislative branch, we have the executive branch, and we have the judicial branch. All three have unique roles. The legislative branch that we are in right now--we write the law. The executive branch executes the law. The judicial branch interprets the law.

Now, we know there is a difference between the House and the Senate. The Senate has a responsibility and the House has a responsibility, and they are different, but they are both in the legislative branch.

The judicial branch also has different pieces as well, just like the legislative branch. There is the Supreme Court. We know that. It is right across the street. There are nine Justices that sit there, and they are the final decision makers on what the law says. But there are also daughter courts. There are circuit courts below the Supreme Court, and below the Supreme Court, there are district courts. District courts are scattered all over the country, and those individual, small district courts that are scattered all around the country--those individual courts make a decision on the person that is in front of them.

Now, again, this is fairly simple civics. When you have a Federal case in front of you, you go to the district court, and you file, and you get time in front of a judge. It may take time to be able to get there, but they make a decision on what is in front of them. That is what district courts do. They don't make decisions on something that is in a different State. The fine judges that are in Oklahoma make decisions about the case that is in front of them in Oklahoma. They don't decide a case in Indiana because they are not in Indiana and it is not a case filed in front of them; it is only the case filed in front of them in Oklahoma.

Now, if there is a dispute about that, it can be appealed, and it goes up to a circuit court, and it takes in a region. If there is a dispute even there, they take it on to the Supreme Court.

It is pretty simple--until the last several decades. You see, prior to 1960, there was no such thing as a nationwide injunction. No one even considered that. But we started seeing this beginning point where a district judge in a court in a single State would hear a case and say: This is so big, I am not going to let this go to the circuit court or to the Supreme Court. In my lower--in fact, lowest--court in the Federal structure, I am going to decide for the entire country, not just the person in front of me.

There were just a few that happened at that time, and the Supreme Court kind of looked away because they seemed like big cases. But then it started to rise.

During the George W. Bush administration, there were six nationwide injunctions that were done in these local district courts. Under President Obama, there were 12 nationwide injunctions that were issued. Then under President Trump, the first term, there were 64 nationwide injunctions.

More and more individual district courts decided: I have an opinion, and I am not going to decide about the case in front of me; I am going to decide about the entire country.

Under President Biden, there were 14 nationwide injunctions that happened. In fact, President Biden's Solicitor General--the one who actually argues to the Supreme Court--warned that nationwide injunctions halt legal government actions and policies.

See, this is not a Republican-Democrat thing; this is a constitutional thing. This is the U.S. Constitutional structure to say: What is the role of lower courts? What is the role of a circuit court? What is the role of the Supreme Court?

We as people in our Nation honor the constitutional construct. For me, it is exceptionally important that the courts are blind to these issues and that they take action on the case in front of them and not a case that is not in front of them.

Senator Grassley has introduced a bill to rein in the use of nationwide injunctions. His legislation is called the Judicial Relief Clarification Act. It makes it very simple. It is an important piece of legislation to decide how we are going to handle cases like this. It is very simple: Courts decide the cases in front of them. That had been the practice up until the early 1960s. We need to get it to be back to that practice again.

It is not a Republican issue and not a Democrat issue. It is a constitutional issue.

Nationwide injunctions are a backdoor way for judges to actually write legislation and to bring the decision of the executive branch to a halt.

The executive branch does have checks and balances, as does the legislative branch, as does the judicial branch. Those checks and balances are clear. If the executive branch does something inconsistent with the Constitution, it goes to our Federal courts and quickly works its way up through the district court, circuit court, to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is the one who checks the executive branch, not each district court around the country. It is the Supreme Court. We need to be able get back to that process in the days ahead. That needs to be done.

So I am looking forward to seeing Senator Grassley's legislation actually move.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source