The New Yorker:

The Trump Administration is trying to use the case to stop lower-court judges from issuing “nationwide injunctions” against its unconstitutional executive orders.

By Ruth Marcus

An hour into the oral arguments in the birthright-citizenship case at the Supreme Court last Thursday, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson offered a tart summary of the Trump Administration’s playbook in what will surely be its losing bid to end the constitutional guarantee. “Your argument,” Jackson told D. John Sauer, the Solicitor General, would “turn our justice system” into a “ ‘catch me if you can’ kind of regime,” in which “everybody has to have a lawyer and file a lawsuit in order for the government to stop violating people’s rights.” Jackson kept going: “I don’t understand how that is remotely consistent with the rule of law.”

Her diagnosis applies beyond the birthright-citizenship case. The Trump Administration has unleashed a torrent of unconstitutional executive orders and other questionable legal actions; with many of them, its goal seems less to win in the end than to inflict as much damage as possible along the way. That is why it is so determined to use the birthright-citizenship case to stop lower-court judges from issuing “nationwide injunctions”—orders that block Administration policies from taking effect across the country while their legality is hashed out in court. Lower courts, Sauer argued to the Justices, must limit their rulings to the individual parties in the case before them. Others who are harmed by the policies need to find ways to bring their own suits—unless and until the Supreme Court steps in with a definitive ruling. In other words, “catch me if you can.”

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