Judicial Overreach and Constitutional Limits on the Federal Courts
2025-04-01
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Source: Congress.gov
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The Honorable Newt Gingrich
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The Honorable Newt Gingrich
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The Honorable Newt Gingrich
The subcommittee will come to order. Without objection, the chair is authorized to declare a recess at any time. We welcome everyone here today for a joint hearing on judicial overreach in the federal courts. Before I recognize myself, I'd ask unanimous consent that members of the full committee, but not of the subcommittees, Mr. Moskowitz and Mr. Biggs, be allowed to sit in and participate in today's hearing. Without objection, so ordered. And as a point of personal privilege, before I make my opening statement, Speaker Gingrich, I've been here now, this is my 25th year on the Hill, and the first time I've had the pleasure of having you as a witness. I will cherish that as much as I cherish the time I once carried your bag off of an airplane in San Diego and found out you were the speaker, but you were also a regular guy. So with that, I'll now recognize myself for an opening statement. We are here today because a major malfunction in the federal judiciary has been recognized by both Republicans and Democrats. Activists, district court judges usurping themselves with their Article III power and imposing on the nation injunctions beyond the scope of what the United States Congress under statute has given federal judges. These rogue judge rulings are a new resistance to the Trump administration and the only time in which judges in robes in this number have felt it necessary to participate in the political process rather than to participate in the Article III powers given to them both by the Constitution and by statute. President Trump was elected to assert many policies, including the deportation of criminal aliens.
He did so publicly and was elected by a majority of Americans and the vast majority of the Electoral College. But he also did so in stark contrast to executive orders of the previous administration. Time and time again, rogue judges have asserted, as though they were five of the nine members of the Supreme Court, their authority when the president was doing nothing more than undoing a policy of his predecessor, one which they seem to have no problem with in the previous administration. Let me be clear. It should never have come to this. It is within the Supreme Court's ability to rule appropriately that judges have exceeded their jurisdiction. Time and time again, the High Court has ruled on the substance of the ruling rather than on the inappropriate nature of an injunction overly broad and affecting hundreds, thousands, or millions of people beyond the plaintiffs before that court. Just last night, a judge halted the administration's plan to end temporary protective status for about 350,000 Venezuelans that Joe Biden welcomed into this country and gave temporary protective status to. Temporary seems not to be a word understood by the court. If President Biden could give protective status temporarily, how in fact could it not be the prerogative of the next president to undo that status? Nowhere in that protective status was there an act of Congress or a recognition that temporary equals permanent. This is but the latest outrage coming from lower or at least I might say the lowest courts. I have said from the start that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle should support this legislation.
After all, it was the Biden administration who opposed these universal injunctions and said they were illegitimate. In fact, legislation in the last Congress authored by a Democrat is substantially similar to the one that we offer today and would have the same effect. To quote the previous administration's solicitor general, literally the woman who spoke on behalf of the administration before the court, she said, the government must prevail in every suit to keep its policy in force, but plaintiffs can derail a federal program nationwide with just one lower court victory, end quote. Those words by Elizabeth Prolongar, President Biden's own Solicitor General, were from October 2024. In other words, after almost the entire four years of the Biden administration, they still believed and believed till the end that this was wrong. And yet we will probably hear today no support on the other side of the aisle. In fact, this is not new, but it is not old. For 180 years of our nation, there were no such injunctions. Only beginning in 1963 did district courts begin to, in relatively small amounts, believe that they could do these without multiple plaintiffs from multiple circuits. From 2001 to 2023, the number grew to 96. But an incredible 64 of those occurred during only four years, the four years of President Trump, meaning that more than half of all injunctions in this millennium, this century, were against President Trump in his first four years. They used to seem like a lot, but during President Trump's first nine weeks in office this year, he has already faced more nationwide injunctions than President Joe Biden did in his entire four years.
The federal judiciary isn't interpreting the law. It is impeding the presidency. It is, in fact, not co-equal, but holding itself to be superior. Since Marbury, Madison, there's no question at all that the third branch says it's the last word. And we have accepted that for over 200 years.
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