Supreme Court Rebukes Lower Courts for Defying Precedent in Trump Cases: Justice Gorsuch Leads Charge Against Judicial Overreach
The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative justices have taken a firm stance against certain federal lower courts this summer, expressing growing frustration with decisions that deviate from the high court’s precedents. This shift has been particularly evident in the handling of emergency cases related to President Trump’s second term.
In one such instance last week, Justice Neil Gorsuch admonished lower courts for failing to respect Supreme Court decisions, specifically referencing a case involving research grants worth nearly $800 million that Trump sought to cancel. This rebuke, joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, has shifted the narrative away from Trump’s alleged disregard for legal boundaries and towards concerns about lower courts’ adherence to Supreme Court decisions.
Gorsuch’s opinion highlighted three recent cases where the high court had to intervene due to lower courts’ disregard for its precedents. He emphasized that when the Supreme Court issues a decision, it constitutes a precedent that should be respected by lower courts. Gorsuch, who was Trump’s first nominee to the high court, made this statement in a case where his predecessor rulings were being disregarded.
Other conservatives have also been critical of lower courts this year. In March, Justice Samuel Alito accused a federal judge in another case involving a Trump policy of committing “judicial hubris” and self-aggrandizement of jurisdiction.
The Supreme Court has consistently sided with Trump on the emergency docket for months, including high-profile cases dealing with immigration, spending, and independent agencies. According to Steve Vladeck, CNN’s Supreme Court analyst and professor at Georgetown University Law Center, this trend suggests that the justices are more concerned with lower courts correctly interpreting their often unexplained rulings than with the executive branch behaving properly before the rest of the federal judiciary.
In a dissenting opinion on Thursday, liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson described the decision as “Calvinball jurisprudence,” referring to the popular “Calvin and Hobbes” comic, where there are no fixed rules. Trump’s attacks on federal courts have subsided since the spring, but his allies continue to work the refs and misstate the judiciary’s role, often attributing losses in court to politics.
Critics argue that the tension between the executive and judicial branches is due more to Trump’s rhetoric and the Justice Department’s handling of high-profile cases than to the courts themselves. In a scathing dissent earlier this summer, Justice Sonia Sotomayor accused the court of “rewarding lawlessness” by siding with Trump in one of those cases.
Sotomayor and Jackson, both liberals, are the only two justices who have served on district courts, where judges often take the initial stab at applying precedent to new litigation. Most of the other justices were formerly appeals court judges, who review these initial attempts by district courts.
The sharp lines taken by Gorsuch and other conservatives suggest that some justices believe that certain lower courts are overreacting to the administration’s moves. Supporters of these opinions, like James Burnham, an attorney and former Gorsuch clerk, argue that lower courts are required to follow the Supreme Court’s emergency orders as they would any other decree.
However, the approach taken by the Supreme Court in its emergency orders has been a subject of debate. Early in Joe Biden’s presidency, defending the Supreme Court’s emergency docket, Justice Alito stressed that these orders do not establish precedent. Unlike the court’s regular merits docket, emergency orders are usually decided without oral argument or extensive briefing, and they do not resolve the underlying legal questions of a case—only what happens while the litigation continues.
In recent weeks, a majority of justices have sought to reinforce the notion that short-term orders should control the outcome of similar cases. In its fractured decision on Thursday, a 5-4 majority ruled that US District Judge William Young had erred by requiring the administration to revive research grants Trump canceled due to their focus on gender or diversity. The high court’s unsigned opinion, which allows the NIH to keep those grants frozen, pointed to an earlier unsigned emergency order from April that permitted officials to block millions of dollars in grants to states intended to address teacher shortages.
The Supreme Court’s stance on nationwide injunctions has also been significant this year. In its most notable decision, the court stripped the power of lower court judges to issue these injunctions, which have been used to shutdown policies adopted by presidents of both parties. This potentially landmark ruling came in a challenge to Trump’s executive order intending to end birthright citizenship.
Lower courts are continuing to work through whether there are other avenues they can use to temporarily halt policies they believe are unconstitutional. In a decision last month, the court allowed Trump to remove three members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission who were appointed by Biden, citing an earlier unsigned emergency order dealing with firings at labor agencies. Both cases involved whether the president may fire board members at independent agencies despite federal laws intended to shield them from removal for political reasons.
The emergency docket has been a topic of debate as some of the justices have traveled the country for speaking engagements during the court’s summer break. Speaking in California, Justice Elena Kagan suggested the high court could do more to “explain things better” so that lower court judges and the public understand its decisions clearly. Days later, speaking to a group of judges and attorneys in Kansas City, Justice Kavanaugh defended the court’s sometimes terse emergency orders, emphasizing the importance of an independent judiciary and the role judges play in maintaining this independence.