Attorney General Jeff Sessions condemned federal judges Saturday for issuing nationwide injunctions that have blocked parts of President Trump’s agenda from moving forward, including his rescission of an Obama-era immigration program and his travel ban.
“In truth, this is a question of raw power, of who gets to decide the policy questions facing America: our elected representatives, our elected president, or unelected life-time appointed federal judges,” Sessions said during a speech at the Federalist Society’s National Student Symposium. “Today, in effect, single district court judges are going beyond proper adjudicative bounds and making themselves super-legislators for the entire United States.”
Sessions told the audience in Washington, D.C., the nationwide injunctions “result in great cost and turmoil,” and have been used to effectively paralyze the federal government. “There can be no question that courts should put an end to nationwide injunctions and keep activists on both sides of the aisle from paralyzing the federal government,” he said.
Nationwide injunctions are court rulings that block the federal government from enforcing a policy or statute. They apply broadly to those who are not a named party in a lawsuit and remain in place even when another federal judge disagrees.
A federal judge in California, for example, issued a nationwide injunction blocking the Trump administration from rescinding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. A second federal judge in New York followed suit last month.
But a federal judge in Maryland said this week the administration has the power to end the DACA program, delivering a win for the Trump administration.
Sessions lamented Saturday that the Trump administration has been hit with a significant number of nationwide injunctions as it has worked to implement the president’s agenda.
“Scholars have not found a single example of any judge issuing this type of extreme remedy in the first 175 years of the Republic,” he said. “But President Trump has been hit with 22 in just over one year in office — on issues like DACA, the travel order, sanctuary cities, and the service of transgender people in the military.”
But the attorney general acknowledged that previous administrations have also faced similar legal hurdles, including former President Barack Obama, as nationwide injunctions encourage “forum shopping.”
Sessions noted that Republicans frequently challenged Obama-era policies in friendly courts in Texas, while Trump’s opponents are taking their legal battles to California and Hawaii.
“Litigants are looking for the most favorable forum in which to advance their goal of binding the whole nation — virtually always to secure a policy outcome that could never win at the ballot box or in the legislature,” the attorney general said.
The Supreme Court has yet to issue a ruling addressing the merits of nationwide injunctions, but has instead ruled on the issues of the specific cases before it.
Sessions said he hopes the high court tells the lower courts injunctions should be limited to the parties named in the case.
“This is my message,” he said. “We hope the Supreme Court will resolve this issue.”
In a surprise appearance on Saturday, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon addressed France’s far-right National Front, telling a gathering of the party that they are “part of a worldwide movement that is bigger than France, bigger than Italy, bigger than Hungary — bigger than all of it. And history is on our side.”
The one-time White House strategist, who is often credited with helping Donald Trump win the presidency in 2016, told the group, “The tide of history is with us, and it will compel us to victory after victory after victory,” The Washington Post reported.
Dressed in his trademark disheveled canvas coat and several layers of dark clothing, Bannon denounced central banks, central governments and “crony capitalists,” the Associated Press reported.
The surprise address took place on the first day of the party congress in Lille, in northern France. Bannon’s appearance was announced late Friday via Twitter by the party’s Deputy President, Louis Aliot, who wrote: “The people are waking up and taking their destiny in hand.”
Shortly afterwards, Aliot, tweeted a photograph of him shaking hands with Bannon, who he wrote “represents rejection of the establishment of which one of the worst symbols is the EU in Brussels,” The Guardian reported.
Bannon’s speech came as he tours Europe on what he has described as a listening tour. The former Goldman Sachs investment banker, who was ousted from the White House last year and stepped down as chairman of Breitbart News Network in January, has visited Switzerland — he gave his first European speech in Zurich earlier in the week — and Italy, where voters last Sunday elected a parliament dominated by anti-immigrant populists.
He called the Italy vote “an earthquake” that has boosted far-right movements across Europe.
National Front leader Marine Le Pen is working to unite her divided party and bolster her ability to lead it as the party meets for the first time since she lost resoundingly to Emmanuel Macron in the final round of the French presidential election last May.
Macron won with 66% of the vote vs. 34% for Le Pen, who had threatened to curb immigration and pull France out of the European Union, among other measures.
Macron’s victory followed defeats for right-wing populist candidates in Austria and the Netherlands and was largely seen as a counter to the anti-establishment fervor sweeping Europe.
Recent polling showed that 55% of respondents don’t want Le Pen to run in the next election.
In his address, Bannon praised Le Pen’s vision of a political fight between nationalists and globalists, even as a few party members warned that his support could damage Le Pen’s efforts to cleanse the National Front of its racist stigma.
Bannon told the crowd, “Let them call you racists. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists,” The Post reported. “Wear it as a badge of honor. Because every day, we get stronger and they get weaker.”
Le Pen defended inviting Bannon, saying party members should listen to “the architect of Donald Trump’s victory” in 2016.
Founded by Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in the 1970s, the National Front plans to change its name via a vote on Sunday. The younger Le Pen has said the proposed name change is needed to show that the party had become “adult,” The Guardian reported.
She has long sought to “de-demonize” the party by moving away from its racist past, but Le Pen’s own father complained that Bannon was the “most radical” of Trump’s advisers, saying Saturday’s invitation “is not exactly the definition of ‘de-demonization.’”
