Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts stopped fellow Justice Sonia Sotomayor interrupting during oral arguments over birthright citizenship and nationwide injunctions on Thursday.
Sotomayor had been questioning U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer for several minutes about the authority of federal courts issuing nationwide injunctions, often interrupting him as he answered.
“You are claiming that not just the Supreme Court, that both the Supreme Court and no lower court, can stop an executive from universally violating holdings by this court,” Sotomayor said.
“We are not claiming that because we’re conceding that there could be an appropriate case only in class only,” Sauer said.
Sotomayor attempted to interrupt Sauer again until John Roberts stepped in.
“But I hear that–,” Sotomayor said
“Can I hear the rest of his answer?” Roberts interjected.
According to Fox News, Sauer elaborated his statement by saying that ” the government is arguing that federal courts can intervene on behalf of specific plaintiffs before them, but not nationwide,” adding that the Supreme Court can “grant nationwide injunctions in certain circumstances.”
Sauer used the bulk of his opening arguments Thursday to reiterate the Trump administration’s view that universal injunctions exceeded lower courts’ Article III powers under the Constitution, noting that the injunctions “transgress the traditional bounds of equitable authority,” and “create a host of practical problems.”
Universal injunctions “require judges to make rushed, high-stakes, low-information decisions,” he said. “They operate asymmetrically, forcing the government to win everywhere,” and “invert,” in the administration’s view, the ordinary hierarchical hierarchy of appellate review. They create the ongoing risk of conflicting judgments.”
As Breitbart News reported on Thursday, the nine justices seemed to have “little consensus as they grilled government lawyers about the costs and benefits of lower judges imposing nationwide restraining orders on President Donald Trump’s reformist polices, including his update of birth citizenship policies.”
“Trump’s lawyers argued that the many national restraining orders abort the evolution of courtroom and public debates on the issues, and they also block administration planning for how their electoral mandates should be implemented,” said the report.
“The injunctions — which are often imposed by singular partisan judges — should be narrowed to cover just the plaintiffs in each case so that major issues can democratically ‘percolate’ through the multiple courts, the public, and the agencies, said John Sauer, the U.S. solicitor general,” it added.
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