Jamie Raskin on SCOTUS Decision Ending Nationwide Injunctions: They Don’t Want This Case Heard on the Merits

EXCERPT:

RASKIN: “The Reagan judge said this was blatantly unconstitutional, was the most unconstitutional executive action he’d ever seen, and the easiest case he’d ever had to deal with in four decades on the bench, right, which is why they’re running away from the merits, the substance of this decision. And the court shamefully played along with a hide-and-go-seek strategy of saying, ‘Oh, well, there’s a procedural problem, which is these district courts overstepped their equitable jurisdiction.’ And so they reinterpreted the Judiciary Act of 1789 to say for the first time that courts could not decide beyond the literal parties to the case. And, of course, that defeats the whole idea of equitable jurisdiction. Equity means you fit the remedy to the nature of the constitutional violation. And here the violation is one that applies, obviously, all across the country, which every judge has seen. But so, they decided to hem in the courts. On that, we’re going to look at class action lawsuits, nationwide class action, because, of course, the government is saying, ‘Oh, well, if there’s a problem, just go with the nationwide class action.’ Watch them try and stop a class action and get the class de-certified. Watch them challenge it on every ground. They don’t want this case heard on the merits. And that’s what’s so shocking, that the Supreme Court would allow this to drag out when we’ve had birthright citizenship in America since 1868. But in terms of going forward, look, you know, there’s different ways that you could shuffle the deck. If you want to say that in order to get a nationwide or a nationwide injunction, you should have to go to a special court. We use three-judge panels for lots of stuff. Let’s have a three-judge court that just deals with nationwide injunctions, and then anybody can go to that, and we’ll see that we’ve got fair-minded judges and not just partisan hacks who are put on it. And then you fast-track it to the Supreme Court. How about that? We can deal. But this is just chaos that they’ve unleashed in the judicial system for no reason at all.”