Hawley leads Senate charge against nationwide injunctions but stops short at impeaching judges

WASHINGTON (CN) — The Republican senator pushing a legislative crackdown on nationwide injunctions from federal judges said on Capitol Hill Tuesday that his bill addresses a “systemic” issue in the justice system.

But Missouri Senator Josh Hawley was still skeptical of some of his GOP colleagues who have called for a harsher rebuke of judges that have issued nationwide orders hamstringing several of the Donald Trump administration’s sweeping executive orders.

Introduced Monday by Hawley, the bill, if made law, would restrict federal judges’ authority to issue nationwide injunctions — court orders that not only force parties to a case to take a certain action but are broadly applicable across the country.

Such injunctions have been employed in recent weeks by federal district courts to stop the White House from implementing a cornucopia of executive actions, such as mass deportations and a hold on U.S. foreign aid.

“Unelected district judges are usurping the authority of a duly elected president and dictating national policy for 330 million Americans,” Hawley said in a statement attached to the legislation. “Congress must stop this unconstitutional weaponization of the judiciary.”

The push to limit the scope of nationwide injunctions has received some bipartisan attention in recent years, but the issue was supercharged last week as the president himself came out in favor of legislation to halt the use of nationally binding court orders.

“Unlawful Nationwide Injunctions by Radical Left Judges could very well lead to the destruction of our Country!” Trump wrote Thursday in a post on his social media platform Truth Social.

So far, the path forward for Hawley’s legislation remains murky. The Missouri senator told Courthouse News on Tuesday that he had spoken with Senate leadership about the bill but indicated that there was no decision yet about whether to bring it forward.

“I can’t predict what they’re going to do,” he said.

Hawley also opined that his legislation should enjoy bipartisan support, arguing that Democrats had introduced similar measures “because they didn’t like injunctions put in place by Republican-appointed judges.”

Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono in 2023 sponsored a bill that would have forced litigants seeking a national injunction to file their cases in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. And a similar bill filed in the House by New Jersey Representative Mikie Sherrill would have required such cases to be filed in districts with two or more judges — a provision aimed at clamping down on the practice known as “judge shopping.”

Though Hawley’s bill to throttle nationwide injunctions is still in its infancy in the Senate, House Republican lawmakers have already made headway on a similar measure offered by California Representative Darrell Issa. Issa’s bill passed the House Judiciary Committee earlier this month, and House Speaker Mike Johnson has thrown his support behind the measure.

The California Republican congressman has posed his bill as an alternative to a campaign by some of his more conservative colleagues to impeach federal judges who have issued rulings against Trump’s agenda.

Several other Republican lawmakers, led by Tennessee Representative Andy Ogles, have introduced articles of impeachment against a growing list of federal district judges who they have argued demonstrated political bias and run afoul of the Constitution’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” threshold for impeachment.

But that argument has been less than convincing for top Republicans — including Hawley, who told Courthouse News on Tuesday that he wasn’t “hugely crazy” about eliminating judicial seats via impeachment.

The issues his GOP colleagues were angry about, the senator argued, were better addressed by clamping down on nationwide injunctions.

“If you don’t take away the underlying power, my worry is you’ll run into this same problem over and over,” Hawley said. He argued that Congress could switch out judges on a federal district court — but that wouldn’t necessarily preclude a replacement jurist from issuing injunctions in a similar fashion.

“To me, this is really a systemic issue and stopping them from using nationwide injunctions really gets at it,” said the Missouri Republican.

If the Senate were to formally take up Hawley’s bill, it’ll likely need to go before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, who chairs the upper chamber’s legal affairs panel, has previously criticized nationwide injunctions issued by “activist judges.”

The legislative push to do away with nationally binding injunctive relief has also earned another powerful conservative ally in billionaire and Trump advisor Elon Musk. Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency outfit has been subject to several federal court orders, has harshly criticized national injunctions and the judges who have issued such rulings against the White House.

In a Tuesday post on X, Musk accused the judiciary of “daily abuse of authority” and argued that courts were “severely” eroding their public credibility. In an apparent demonstration of his commitment to the issue, Musk also “pinned” that post to his X profile, forcing it to appear at the top of his feed when users visit his page.

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