Supreme Court weighs judges' power over Trump

The Trump administration will be fighting an uphill battle as it tries to persuade the Supreme Court to let more of President Trump's agenda take effect.The big picture: The Justice Department will argue Thursday that lower courts should not be able to stand in the way of Trump's plan to end birthright citizenship — or other executive actions.Federal district courts have issued roughly 30 orders blocking the Trump administration from implementing major parts of its agenda.Three district courts have blocked Trump's executive order on birthright citizenship from taking effect. All three said their rulings applied not only to the specific cases before them, but to the entire policy, nationwide.The Justice Department has asked the Supreme Court to limit the scope of those orders. The court hears oral arguments Thursday.Why it matters: Nationwide injunctions from lower courts have become increasingly common since the Obama administration, and have exploded under Trump.There's a good-faith, non-ideological argument that courts are handing down too many of them. There are more than 600 district court judges in the U.S. — when all of them have the power to freeze a presidential policy, lawsuits can grind the presidency to a halt more easily than ever before.What they're saying: While Thursday's arguments are focused on how courts have handled birthright citizenship, the Justice Department has urged the justices to impose a broader crackdown on nationwide injunctions."This Court should declare that enough is enough," the Justice Department said in a brief to the high court.Zoom in: Even some skeptics of nationwide injunctions say this may not be the right case in which to curtail them.The blue states and advocacy organizations challenging Trump's executive order argue that the question of who's a U.S. citizen is an inherently national one.Rolling back nationwide injunctions in these cases "would leave tens of thousands of infants born on U.S. soil undocumented, subject to removal or detention, and many stateless, even though they have done nothing wrong," they argued in a brief to the court.Every district court to consider Trump's order has said it's likely unconstitutional. And when those orders have been appealed, every appeals court has allowed nationwide injunctions to remain in place.That's evidence that the normal appeals process is working, the challengers argue, so there's no need for the Supreme Court to intervene.Furthermore, the Supreme Court is more likely to take up constitutional questions when there's a disagreement among lower courts that only it can settle. There's no such division here.Between the lines: The case before the court this week isn't about the constitutional merits of Trump's policy, although judges consider the likely outcome of a case when deciding whether to issue injunctions.The 14th Amendment says: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States."That provision means that children born in the U.S. are citizens, even if their parents aren't, the Supreme Court ruled in 1898.What we're watching: Some of the court's conservative justices have called for a crackdown on nationwide injunctions.Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas sharply criticized an injunction that froze Trump's plans to cut off funding for USAID, calling it an "act of judicial hubris."Birthright citizenship presents different legal questions, and the procedural history of these cases is different.Thursday's arguments should provide some indication of whether those four would still be united in this context — and, if so, whether they'd be able to persuade one more justice to join their cause.

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