Workarounds to Supreme Court ruling are working

When the court issued its decision in June limiting the authority of federal judges to halt Trump administration policies nationwide, Justice Samuel Alito raised concerns that the court was leaving loopholes.

And now, The Wall Street Journal says, “It is a rare point of consensus among conservative and liberal lawyers alike: The path to winning rulings with nationwide application is still wide open.”

Litigants are successfully using workarounds including class-action lawsuits, state-led lawsuits, and the Administrative Procedure Act, a law that requires government agencies to act reasonably.

In at least nine cases, judges have grappled explicitly with the Supreme Court’s opinion and granted nationwide relief anyway, the WSJ says. They includes rulings that continue to halt President Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship, kept in place protections against deportations for up to 500,000 Haitians, halted mass layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services, and prevented the government from terminating a legal aid program for mentally ill people in immigration proceedings.

And judges have blocked Trump policies in a half-dozen cases in the past month under the Administrative Procedure Act, in almost every instance specifically saying they aren’t precluded in doing so by the Supreme Court, according to the WSJ.