President Trump has launched his second term with unprecedented vigor, issuing executive orders that dismantle divisive DEI programs in the federal government, reaffirm the scientific recognition of two genders, empower ICE to detain and deport criminal illegal aliens, and cut funding to schools engaged in ideological indoctrination. No president in modern history has governed with such boldness in his first two weeks, and the results are already shaking Washington to its core. The left is in a full panic, but instead of trying to win the argument or the next election, Democrats are rushing to their favorite backstop — the courts — where friendly judges are waiting to issue nationwide injunctions to block Trump’s agenda.
This is their playbook: they can’t convince the public, so they litigate. They lose the election, so they sue. And more often than not, they find an Obama-appointed district judge who, willing to take the bait, hands down an injunction to halt a duly enacted policy nationwide. This is judicial tyranny masquerading as process, and the time for tolerating this obstruction is over. If Trump’s first two weeks prove anything, it’s that when Republicans fight, they win.
Now, it’s time to take the fight to the next level. The Republican-controlled Congress must act immediately to amend the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) — the rules that govern how federal courts operate — and put an end to this abuse of process once and for all.
Nationwide injunctions have no constitutional or statutory basis, nor do the FRCP authorize them. When the FRCP was established in 1938, injunctions were understood as plaintiff-specific remedies: courts issued them to protect only the parties in a lawsuit, not to dictate national policy. But in recent years, activist judges have weaponized injunctions to create judicial veto power over any policy they dislike.
Justice Clarence Thomas has denounced nationwide injunctions as “legally and historically dubious” and “inconsistent with longstanding limits on equitable relief and the power of Article III courts.” Justice Neil Gorsuch has echoed these concerns, calling their rapid expansion “not normal” and emphasizing that they “have little basis in traditional equitable practice.” He warned that such injunctions “hardly seem an innovation we should rush to embrace” and cautioned that they “force judges into making rushed, high-stakes, low-information decisions.” By overriding the normal process of appellate review and inviting judicial overreach, these injunctions have transformed individual lawsuits into sweeping vetoes on national policy — an outcome the Framers never intended.
Legal scholars, including Professors Samuel Bray and Michael Morley, have been sounding the alarm for years. In Multiple Chancellors: Reforming the National Injunction (Harvard Law Review, 2017), Bray illustrates that such injunctions are a recent development, detached from traditional judicial practice. He contends that injunctions were intended to provide relief only to the parties involved in a specific case, not to non-parties across the nation — that they should protect “the plaintiff vis-à-vis the defendant, wherever the plaintiff and the defendant may both happen to be.” Morley, in Disaggregating Nationwide Injunctions (Alabama Law Review, 2019), concludes that nationwide injunctions are “inconsistent with both the structure of the federal judiciary” and “lead to extreme forum shopping and unnecessary emergency appeals.” Put simply, our federal judiciary was never meant to function as a permanent opposition party. Nationwide injunctions have allowed it to become exactly that.
The solution is simple: amend Rule 65 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to prohibit district courts from issuing injunctions that extend beyond the actual parties in a case.
This is not a radical move, nor one that could be overturned in court — it is a straightforward exercise of congressional authority under the Rules Enabling Act (28 U.S.C. § 2071 et. seq.), the very same statute which authorized the creation of the FRCP in the first place, and which reserves to Congress the power to prescribe, modify, or override those rules. Accordingly, Congress retains the unquestioned authority to amend the FRCP — just as it would any other federal law. Yet amazingly, in the many decades since the nationwide injunction first emerged, only one bill has ever been introduced to abolish it — a bill that never even reached the floor for a vote.
What is striking is that this solution — Congress simply legislating a fix — has been overlooked for so long. In an era where litigation dominates policymaking, the left has treated nationwide injunctions as though they are a fixed feature of the judicial landscape. Yet there is no statute permitting a single district judge to freeze federal policy across the entire nation, no section of the FRCP endorsing it, no constitutional provision authorizing it. It has simply been assumed into existence by activist courts, treated as legitimate through repetition rather than any legal foundation.
President Trump is playing to win, governing with a level of clarity and conviction unmatched by any Republican president before him. Congress must follow his lead by amending Rule 65. End the judicial veto, restore the rule of law, and clear the way for the bold conservative reforms that the American people voted for. It’s time to fight, and it’s time to win.
Brian Landrum is an Attorney, Advertising Producer, and Principal at Politicus, specializing in political media and communications. With a background in law and public policy, he has spent over a decade crafting messaging and strategy that has shaped public opinion, influenced legislation, and impacted policy decisions at the highest levels.
