The Supreme Court Decision Undermining Lower Courts Is Worse Than You Think
Issues
This excerpt is from a piece by Rachel Rossi that originally ran at Ms. Magazine on July 9, 2025.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. CASA, the birthright citizenship case, had little to do with birthright citizenship. It instead handed a far more dangerous victory to President Trump by gutting the power of lower courts to hold back his unlawful actions, holding that lower courts can no longer issue “nationwide” or “universal injunctions.”
To understand exactly how this prohibition will help empower Trump, let’s consider how a different hypothetical Trump policy would play out in this new system.
Imagine Trump issued a new executive order banning women from registering to vote. Under this hypothetical order, only those women already registered to vote could continue voting, and they could not register again if they moved or had a name change. Women who were not already registered could never register to vote or access the polls absent a court order allowing them to. So, in this hypothetical, what would happen next?