Attorney General Ellison statement on today’s Supreme Court ruling

“I remain confident that my fellow attorneys general and I will defeat President Trump's attempt to end birthright citizenship and strip citizenship from people born in the United States for the first time in over a century. I am, however, deeply dismayed that the Supreme Court would erode the power of the judiciary to halt blatantly unconstitutional actions from President Trump through nationwide injunctions. If injunctions are going to be limited in scope to those who filed a lawsuit, it is more important than ever that state attorneys general continue to lead the legal fight in defense of the Constitution and on behalf of the people we were elected to represent.

“President Trump has repeatedly violated his oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. I believe the Supreme Court’s decision to ignore this obvious reality and limit the judiciary’s ability to uphold the rule of law is a mistake of monumental proportions. However, no setback will deter me from doing everything in my power to defend our Constitution, the rule of law, and the rights of every Minnesotan.”

The Government does not ask for complete stays of the injunctions, as it ordinarily does before this Court. Why? The answer is obvious: To get such relief, the Government would have to show that the Order is likely constitutional, an impossible task in light of the Constitution’s text, history, this Court’s precedents, federal law, and Executive Branch practice. So the Government instead tries its hand at a different game. It asks this Court to hold that, no matter how illegal a law or policy, courts can never simply tell the Executive to stop enforcing it against anyone. Instead, the Government says, it should be able to apply the Citizenship Order (whose legality it does not defend) to everyone except the plaintiffs who filed this lawsuit. The gamesmanship in this request is apparent and the Government makes no attempt to hide it. Yet, shamefully, this Court plays along. A majority of this Court decides that these applications, of all cases, provide the appropriate occasion to resolve the question of universal injunctions and end the centuries-old practice once and for all. In its rush to do so the Court disregards basic principles of equity as well as the long history of injunctive relief granted to non-parties."

“It is important to recognize that the Executive's bid to vanquish so-called "universal injunctions" is, at bottom, a request for this Court's permission to engage in unlawful behavior. When the Government says "do not allow the lower courts to enjoin executive action universally as a remedy for unconstitutional conduct," what it is actually saying is that the Executive wants to continue doing something that a court has determined violates the Constitution - please allow this. That is some solicitation. With its ruling today, the majority largely grants the Government's wish. But, in my view, if this country is going to persist as a Nation of laws and not men, the Judiciary has no choice but to deny it.

Stated simply, what it means to have a system of government that is bounded by law is that everyone is constrained by the law, no exceptions. And for that to actually happen, courts must have the power to order everyone (including the Executive) to follow the law—full stop. To conclude otherwise is to endorse the creation of a zone of lawlessness within which the Executive has the prerogative to take or leave the law as it wishes, and where individuals who would otherwise be entitled to the law's protection become subject to the Executive's whims instead.”

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