The Trump administration is once again seeking the Supreme Court’s help.
This week’s urgent plea for high court relief comes in a specific case, but it takes aim at all the losses dealt by judges across the country.
“This preliminary injunction also contributes to an untenable trend,” acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris wrote in an application Monday, seeking an immediate halt to a California judge’s order to reinstate thousands of federal employees who were fired last month.
“In the two months since Inauguration Day, district courts have issued more than 40 injunctions or TROs against the Executive Branch,” Harris went on, referring to temporary restraining orders. Calling the status quo “unsustainable,” the former Clarence Thomas clerk wrote that judges are “emboldened by the lack of prompt appellate review” and that “only this Court can end the interbranch power grab.”
“This Court should stop the ongoing assault on the constitutional structure before further damage is wrought,” Harris wrote.
The dramatic filing comes to a court that hasn’t been overly eager to help the administration with legal fights so far in President Donald Trump’s second term. Earlier this month, the justices split 5-4 in rejecting the government’s bid to avoid paying nearly $2 billion in foreign aid funds for already completed work. When Harris went to the justices two weeks ago with applications to narrow nationwide injunctions in Trump’s attempt to curb birthright citizenship, they didn’t make the opposing parties’ responses due until April 4. The relatively luxurious deadline suggests the court doesn’t feel much urgency to step in. To be sure, it’s early in Trump’s second term, and these opening litigation battles are just some of the likely many to come in the weeks, months and years ahead. But this latest filing portrays a serious concern from the government about how things are going. We’ll see in this case and others if a majority of the court wants to change the status quo. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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