WASHINGTON — Iowa’s Republican U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley is leading the charge to reform district judges’ ability to use nationwide injunctions as federal judges continue to block President Donald Trump’s executive orders.
In an interview with The Daily Iowan, Grassley, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said his bill, titled the Judicial Relief Clarification Act, is aimed at reigning in this power and requiring district court judges confine their rulings to the parties in front of court.
“There’s nothing in the laws or nothing in the Constitution that says one judge in one of our 93 district court systems, and one judge out of more than 600 district judges, can make a decision that applies nationwide,” Grassley said. “For the first 175 years of the history of our country, we never had such a thing, and it’s only gotten to be a big thing in the last 15 years.”
Grassley’s bill would limit federal court orders to parties directly before the court and require parties seeking nationwide relief to file a class action lawsuit. The bill would also make any injunctions on executive actions immediately appealable.
“It’s past the time to address this issue,” Grassley said during an April 2 hearing on the issue. “The Supreme Court can and should fix this problem. Unfortunately, they’ve sat on their hands. If they won’t act, Congress must.”
The issue comes as federal judges are passing down nationwide injunctions on a number of actions by Trump as advocacy groups bring legal action against them in court.
According to an analysis by The New York Times, 68 of the dozens of lawsuits filed against the Trump administration have resulted in temporary injunctions.
Grassley said the issue should be bipartisan, since it is relevant no matter who is in the White House.
“Most of us in this room have, at various times, supported or opposed universal injunctions,” Grassley said during the April 2 hearing. “My fellow Republicans and I sometimes like them when there’s a Democrat president. And my Democratic colleagues probably like them right now, even though they criticized them a few months ago under President Biden.”
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Senator Dick Durbin, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the issue is only prevalent because Trump has more executive orders than any other president — many of which are illegal.
“We’ve heard repeated complaints from Republicans about the number of injunctions issued against this president compared to other presidents,” Durbin said during his opening statement at the April 2 Judiciary Committee hearing on the matter. “They ignore the fact that this president has issued more than 100 executive orders — the most by any president at this point in his term in at least four decades — and many are clearly illegal.”
Iowa Democratic Party Chair Rita Hart said in an interview with the DI the bill takes away the checks and balances America was founded on.
“There’s three branches of government, and each part of our government has a responsibility to check the other two, and the judiciary should be doing exactly that,” Hart said. “They should be checking the legislative and the executive branches, and that’s what we want them to do.”