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Constitution was on Trial in Trump v. CASA [1]

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Date: 2025-06-29

By a 6-3 rightwing majority vote, the United States Supreme Court in Trump v. CASA threw out the ability of federal courts to issue injunctions that temporarily block illegal and unconstitutional actions by an authoritarian President. CASA de Maryland, Inc. is a nonprofit immigrant advocacy and services organization. The majority decision written by Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett allows Trump’s Executive Order 14160 redefining American citizenship to go into effect while the case moves through the court system, something that can take years. It also limited who has “standing,” the right to participate in a suit, making it more difficult to halt an illegal or unconstitutional action by a President. The six member court majority took no position on the constitutionality of Trump’s attempt to strip citizenship away from millions of people born in the United States, something guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the court ruling in an opinion written by Sotomayor. Sotomayor charged that the Supreme Court decision “abdicates its vital role” in fighting for survival of the rule of law in the United States. She wrote “With the stroke of a pen, the President has made a ‘solemn mockery’ of our Constitution” and “Rather than stand firm, the Court gives way. Because such complicity should know no place in our system of law, I dissent.”

In a separate dissent Justice Jackson charged that the court’s decision marked an “existential threat to the rule of law” because “It gives the Executive the go-ahead to sometimes wield the kind of unchecked, arbitrary power the Founders crafted our Constitution to eradicate.”

What follows are excerpts from the written dissent by Justice Jackson in Trump v. CASA which will become one of the historic Supreme Court cases. Justice Jackson’s powerful defense of rule by law, the Constitution and democracy in the United States will become a defining statement in American history.

“The Court’s decision to permit the Executive to violate the Constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law. 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.”

“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.”

“The majority now does what none of the lower courts that have considered Executive Order No. 14160 would do: It allows the Executive’s constitutionally dubious mandate to go into effect with respect to anyone who is not already a plaintiff in one of the existing legal actions. Notably, the Court has not determined that any of the lower courts were wrong about their conclusion that the executive order likely violates the Constitution — the Executive has not asked us to rule on the lawfulness of Executive Order No. 14160. But the majority allows the Executive to implement this order (which lower courts have so far uniformly declared likely unconstitutional) nonetheless.”

“I view the demise of the notion that a federal judge can order the Executive to adhere to the Constitution as a sad day for America. The majority’s unpersuasive effort to justify this result makes it sadder still. It is the responsibility of each and every jurist to hold the line. But the Court now requires judges to look the other way after finding that the Executive is violating the law, shamefully permitting unlawful conduct to continue unabated. Today’s ruling thus surreptitiously stymies the Judiciary’s core duty to protect and defend constitutional rights. It does this indirectly, by preventing lower courts from telling the Executive that it has to stop engaging in conduct that violates the Constitution. Instead, now, a court’s power to prevent constitutional violations comes with an asterisk—a court can make the Executive cease its unconstitutional conduct *but only with respect to the particular plaintiffs named in the lawsuit before them, leaving the Executive free to violate the constitutional rights of anyone and everyone else.”

“Make no mistake: Today’s ruling allows the Executive to deny people rights that the Founders plainly wrote into our Constitution, so long as those individuals have not found a lawyer or asked a court in a particular manner to have their rights protected. This perverse burden shifting cannot coexist with the rule of law. In essence, the Court has now shoved lower court judges out of the way in cases where executive action is challenged, and has gifted the Executive with the prerogative of sometimes disregarding the law. As a result, the Judiciary—the one institution that is solely responsible for ensuring our Republic endures as a Nation of laws—has put both our legal system, and our system of government, in grave jeopardy.”

“Perhaps the degradation of our rule-of-law regime would happen anyway. But this Court’s complicity in the creation of a culture of disdain for lower courts, their rulings, and the law (as they interpret it) will surely hasten the downfall of our governing institutions, enabling our collective demise. At the very least, I lament that the majority is so caught up in minutiae of the Government’s self-serving, finger-pointing arguments that it misses the plot. The majority forgets (or ignores) that ‘[w]ith all its defects, delays and inconveniences, men have discovered no technique for long preserving free government except that the Executive be under the law, and that the law be made by parliamentary deliberations’ (opinion of R. Jackson). Tragically, the majority also shuns this prescient warning: Even if ‘[s]uch institutions may be destined to pass away,’ “\it is the duty of the Court to be last, not first, to give them up.’”

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