10 hours ago
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
Rubenfeld Slips Up on Nationwide Injunctions
We agree with the general principle expressed in Jed Rubenfeld's op-ed 'Nationwide Injunctions? Only if the Supreme Court Has Spoken' (May 31). District judges shouldn't be able to force any president to abide by their will through nationwide preliminary injunctions on issues where the Supreme Court hasn't spoken clearly and definitively. Aside from raising the legal standard for issuing such injunctions, the Supreme Court should also consider procedural steps that could be taken to challenge a nationwide injunction once issued, such as an expedited appeal to the regional circuit or to the high court itself.
Yet we do object to how Mr. Rubenfeld applies his argument to President Trump's executive order on the limits of birthright citizenship for the children of parents who have unlawfully entered the country. The Supreme Court hasn't yet ruled on whether birthright citizenship applies to such children, even though executive officials may have assumed that to be the case several decades after the adoption of the 14th Amendment. In the decades leading up to the 1900s, however, executive officials took a much narrower view of automatic citizenship at birth.
