Senators spar over nationwide injunctions stopping Trump policies

Posted June 3, 2025 at 5:40pm

Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee used a congressional hearing Tuesday to air grievances about district court rulings against the Trump administration, as Democrats argued judges are simply doing their job.

The joint subcommittee hearing was among the latest Republican pushback to district judges who have ruled against the Trump administration, at times using nationwide injunctions to temporarily pause or slow executive branch actions.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, used his opening remarks to list off a string of cases in which courts ruled against the Trump administration.

In one example, Cruz referenced an order from a Rhode Island district court that blocked Trump administration agencies from freezing funds awarded through two high-profile laws enacted during the Biden administration, a bipartisan infrastructure law and a separate climate, tax and health care package.

“What we’re witnessing is the rise of judicial lawfare from the bench. One unelected district judge, sitting in a courtroom in San Francisco or Boston or Baltimore, can now issue a nationwide injunction that ties the hands of the president of the United States,” Cruz said.

Cruz said judges were confirmed “not to legislate, not to govern, but to apply the law.”

He also slammed the rate of what he called “universal injunctions” against the government during the second Trump administration.

Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., picked up on that point during his opening remarks, saying “universal injunctions effectively didn’t happen for the first 200 years of our Constitution.”

“Yet they’ve become a fixture in our legal system in the last 20, especially when Donald Trump occupies the White House,” Schmitt said.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said some Republican lawmakers cheered nationwide injunctions against the Biden administration, and argued that the Trump administration is engaged in “unprecedented lawlessness. Period.”

Whitehouse said many of the executive orders from Trump are “flat out, on their face illegal.”

“Hearings like this prop up a narrative that bad courts are stopping dear leader Donald Trump because some cabal of Democratic judges is out to get him. Wrong,” Whitehouse said. “The reality is much simpler: He’s breaking the law. And doing it a lot. And judges are doing their job.”

The joint hearing comes as Republicans this Congress have tried to curtail the power of federal district judges to issue nationwide injunctions.

In the House, lawmakers passed a bill that would limit that power. Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, has also introduced a bill on the topic.

And earlier this year, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, urged House appropriators to consider including language in fiscal 2026 funding bills that would “address the abusive use of nationwide injunctions.” It remains unseen if appropriators will take that step.

The Supreme Court could also act on the issue as well. During oral arguments last month in a case over birthright citizenship, a majority of justices on the nation’s highest court appeared ready to put some limits on the ability of single federal district judges to freeze presidential actions nationwide.