Republican-led US House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to curtail the ability of judges to issue nationwide injunctions blocking government policies after key parts of President Donald Trump’s agenda have been stymied by such court rulings.
The House voted 219-213 along largely party lines in favor of the No Rogue Rulings Act, a bill that top Republican lawmakers have called a priority after numerous judges ruled against Trump’s executive orders and policies used to implement his immigration crackdown and government downsizing initiatives.
The bill now goes to the Senate, where it faces long odds of securing the 60 votes needed to become law. Republicans have only a 53-47 majority in the Senate, where similar legislation to limit nationwide injunctions is pending.
Such nationwide orders from judges have risen over the last two decades in response to challenges to policies issued by Republican and Democratic administrations, prompting calls in both parties over the years for reform.
Yet the latest bill was introduced only after judges in some of the 170-plus lawsuits challenging Trump’s flurry of executive orders and initiatives began issuing a wave of rulings blocking policies they deemed unlawful or unconstitutional.
“Since President Trump has returned to office, left-leaning activists have cooperated with ideological judges whom they have sought out to take their cases and weaponized nationwide injunctions to stall dozens of lawful executive actions and initiatives,” US Representative Darrell Issa, the bill’s lead Republican sponsor, said on the floor on Tuesday.
Under his bill, judges would have to limit the scope of their rulings to the specific parties before them, though they could still issue nationwide orders in class action lawsuits.
Cases by two or more states would be heard by randomly assigned three-judge panels, whose rulings could be appealed directly to the US Supreme Court.
Republican Speaker Mike Johnson has touted it as an alternative to calls by some of Trump’s allies in the chamber to impeach judges who block the Republican president’s agenda.
“No one single activist judge should be able to issue a nationwide injunction to stop a president’s policies,” Johnson told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Monday night ahead of the vote. “That’s not the way the framers intended this to work, and we’re going to put them back in check.”
Democrats lambasted the bill as an effort to change the rules to ensure judges could not fully block anything unlawful Trump does while in office, after many of former President Joe Biden’s own initiatives were blocked by courts.
“The whole idea of suddenly blocking nationwide injunctions because Donald Trump is losing every single day in court defeats the whole concept of the rule of law,” Representative Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said at a committee hearing last week on the bill.
Raskin said had it been law, the bill would have prevented federal judges in Washington state, Massachusetts and Maryland from issuing the nationwide injunctions that have blocked Trump’s “blatantly unconstitutional” attempt to restrict automatic US birthright citizenship as part of his immigration agenda.
The Trump administration has asked the US Supreme Court to narrow those injunctions to cover just the plaintiffs that brought the cases, saying the justices “should declare that enough is enough before district courts’ burgeoning reliance on universal injunctions becomes further entrenched.”
The court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, has yet to act on that request.
But it has handed Trump a series of recent victories, halting judges’ orders that required the administration rehire thousands of fired employees and reinstate millions of dollars in teacher training grants and blocked the administration from pursuing deportations of alleged Venezuelan gang members using a 1798 wartime law, though that decision imposed limits.
The Trump administration welcomed Wednesday’s action in Congress, which a US Justice Department spokesperson said would “reinforce the separation of powers.”
“This Department of Justice has vigorously defended President Trump’s policies and will continue to do so whenever challenged in federal court by rogue judges who think they can control the president’s executive authority,” the spokesperson said.