Fact vs. freakout on the SCOTUS universal injunctions ruling.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

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Today’s read: 15 minutes.

An “authentic racial reckoning.”

On Friday, Tangle’s newly minted Editor-at-Large Kmele Foster published his debut essay: an exploration of the 2020 racial reckoning, a criticism of what it wrought for the country, and a vision for how to navigate race in the future. The piece generated the most comments of any article we’ve published this month, and a healthy mix of praise, criticism, and questions.

To that end, we’re going to experiment with a new format and hold a livestream with Kmele on Wednesday night at 8pm ET, where Isaac will be channeling feedback from readers to flesh out Kmele’s thoughts. We’re hoping to do more of this as our capacity for video, streaming, and community building grows. (P.S. Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel!)

Quick hits.

1. The Senate voted 51–49 to advance the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, setting up a final vote on the bill’s passage this week. Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Rand Paul (R-KY) joined all Democrats in voting against the procedural motion. (The vote) Separately, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) withdrew a provision from the bill that would have allowed for the sale of federal lands for development, citing opposition from his colleagues. (The removal)
2. Sen. Tillis announced he will not seek reelection in 2026. Tillis will serve out the remainder of his term. (The announcement)
3. On Friday, President Donald Trump said he was terminating trade negotiations with Canada over the country’s digital services tax on American technology companies. On Sunday, Canada said it was rescinding the tax in anticipation of a trade deal with the United States. (The latest) Separately, President Trump announced that he had found a group that intends to buy TikTok’s U.S. assets and that he would reveal their identities in about two weeks. Trump added that China would likely need to approve the deal. (The comments) 
4. Two firefighters in Idaho were killed and another was injured while responding to a brush fire in what authorities called an ambush. The suspected shooter was later found dead. (The shooting)
5. The Israel Defense Forces said that it killed Hakem al-Issa, one of the founders of Hamas and an architect of the Oct. 7 attacks, in an airstrike in Gaza City. (The strike)

Today’s topic.

Trump v. CASA. On Friday, the Supreme Court voted 6–3 to partially pause rulings by federal judges blocking President Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship. The decision did not weigh the constitutionality of the executive order but dealt solely with federal courts issuing universal injunctions, which prohibit the government from enforcing a law or policy anywhere in the country. The court’s majority repudiated such orders but left open the possibility that lawsuits brought by states could challenge Trump’s executive order. 

Back up: On the first day of his second term, President Trump issued an executive order declaring that children born in the United States whose parents are not legal permanent residents are no longer entitled to automatic citizenship. Multiple district judges blocked the order before it took effect, issuing universal injunctions that prevented it from being enforced even in states not involved in the challenge. The Trump administration appealed the three district-court injunctions to the Supreme Court, which represented the case by the challenge issued from CASA, Inc., and expedited it through its emergency docket. 

We covered oral arguments in the case in May. 

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said that district courts had “likely exceeded” their statutory authority by issuing rulings that do not apply solely to the plaintiffs bringing lawsuits. “The universal injunction was conspicuously nonexistent for most of our Nation’s history. Its absence from 18th- and 19th-century equity practice settles the question of judicial authority,” Barrett wrote. “That the absence continued into the 20th century renders any claim of historical pedigree still more implausible.” 

Although the court’s ruling significantly narrows the use of universal injunctions, it also instructed lower courts to determine if an injunction would be appropriate for states challenging the order. A “patchwork injunction” could be overly onerous to apply, Barrett wrote for the majority, as “it would require [states] to track and verify the immigration status of the parents of every child, along with the birth State of every child for whom they provide certain federally funded benefits.”

Barrett added that universal injunctions were not necessary to provide “complete relief” to the parties challenging the order. Justice Clarence Thomas extended this argument in a concurring opinion, writing, “In some circumstances, a court cannot award complete relief. As the Court today affirms, any relief must fall within traditional limits on a court’s equitable powers.” Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh also filed concurring opinions, which discussed the open legal question of whether states can bring suits on behalf of their residents and the court’s responsibility to rule on future cases on district courts granting or denying requests for preliminary injunctions, respectively.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson authored dissenting opinions. Sotomayor noted that “every court to evaluate [Trump’s executive order] has deemed it patently unconstitutional,” making a universal injunction appropriate. Jackson called the decision “an existential threat to the rule of law,” suggesting that the Trump administration had effectively requested “this Court’s permission to engage in unlawful behavior.” Barrett notably rebuked Jackson’s dissent in her opinion, writing, “Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”

Today, we’ll share perspectives from the left and right on the court’s ruling, followed by my take.

What the left is saying.

• The left criticizes the ruling, arguing that it removes a key check on Trump’s administration.
• Some suggest it will permanently shift the balance of power in government. 
• Others claim the decision is not as damaging as some are making it out to be.

In The New Yorker, Ruth Marcus said “the Supreme Court sides with Trump against the judiciary.”

“The courts cannot protect us from President Donald Trump’s unconstitutional overreach. That is the terrifying lesson of Friday’s 6–3 Supreme Court ruling,” Marcus wrote. “Friday’s decision means that courts are now hobbled from stopping any of the Administration’s actions, no matter how unconstitutional they may be, nor how much damage they will inflict. Once again, the Court’s conservative super-majority abandoned its constitutionally assigned role and dangerously empowered the President.”

“It remains unlikely that the Court, when it finally gets around to deciding the merits of the dispute, will uphold Trump’s effort to undo birthright citizenship… But imagine the harms that can ensue in the meantime: parents unable to obtain Social Security numbers for their children; infants denied health coverage or nutrition assistance,” Marcus said. “Given Congress’s abdication of its constitutional role, the courts remain the best immediate vehicle for combatting Trump’s excesses… With Friday’s ruling, though, they are unnecessarily handcuffed.”

In New York Magazine, Elie Honig wrote “the Supreme Court just gave the president more power.”

“The Supreme Court’s decision is about the presidency more than the current president or any particular chief executive. Objections to nationwide injunctions cross party lines; whoever is in the White House at any given moment hates them. The Obama and Biden administrations opposed nationwide injunctions that blocked several of their key executive initiatives, from Biden’s student-loan program to Obama’s path-to-citizenship initiatives,” Honig said. “In fact, the Biden administration specifically argued in the courts against nationwide injunctions — raising the same core arguments made by the Trump administration here.

“While the outcome is surely a win for Trump, he and his top brass have overstated the decision by claiming that district courts can no longer stop presidential action at all. In fact, district courts still have the power to block presidential initiatives with respect to the actual parties in any given lawsuit, and potentially more broadly,” Honig wrote. “So what happens next? I’d expect to see a rush to the courthouse doors as people who may be harmed by Trump’s policies come to realize that they cannot free-ride on broad-based judicial declarations in favor of other plaintiffs.”

In Bloomberg, Noah Feldman argued the ruling “is being overhyped.”

“In the short term, the decision is a win for the Trump administration, which has faced multiple such orders issued by lower courts blocking a range of unprecedented and illegal actions. But the opinion, by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, left room for those courts to use other legal techniques to achieve the same end. And the Supreme Court will continue to be able to block executive actions nationwide with precedent-based rulings,” Feldman said. The real-world outcome, therefore, may not be as bad as it appears on the surface.

“Jackson, in her dissent, claimed that the majority was repudiating the rule of law by allowing unconstitutional actions to stand. Barrett replied that while accusing the majority of enabling an imperial executive, Jackson was embracing the idea of an imperial judiciary,” Feldman wrote. “Both are partly right and partly wrong. If Trump can, in practice, issue plainly unlawful executive orders and get away with it, that would indeed undermine the rule of law, as Jackson charged. But Barrett’s decision need not spell the end of judicial action to constrain a law-flouting executive. Judicial creativity will continue.”

What the right is saying.

• The right mostly praises the court’s decision, saying it limits the power of activist judges.
• Some criticize Justice Jackson’s dissent as harmful to court norms.
• Others call on Congress to add further clarity to the use of nationwide injunctions.

The Washington Examiner editorial board called the ruling “a welcome check on activist judges.”

“Federal courts have always had the power, and have exercised it, to enter injunctive relief between the named parties in a given suit. Federal civil procedure also has a well-developed body of law, Rule 23 class actions, allowing for similarly situated possible plaintiffs to be covered by one case. But universal injunctions go far beyond class action jurisdiction, enforcing remedies on everyone, not just smaller groups which, by rule, must have something in common,” the board wrote. “Barrett methodically reviewed the historical record, establishing that universal injunctions did not exist in the High Court of Chancery in England, on which the Judiciary Act of 1789 was modeled, and did not exist for decades after that until 1963.”

“As the legislative and executive branches have become increasingly incapable of working together to pass legislation, the executive branch has increasingly taken it upon itself to assert new powers or use older grants of power in novel ways, and federal courts have been forced to step in and adjudicate which actions are legal and which are not. But this does not empower judges to step beyond the power granted to them by Congress,” the board said. “Barrett wisely advised judges that they should not seek to set national policy and should instead cabin their injunctive relief as narrowly as possible.”

In The New York Post, Jonathan Turley criticized “Justice Jackson’s activist opinion.”

“The tenor of Jackson’s language shocked not just many court watchers, but her colleagues…  The Court often deals with issues that deeply divide the nation. Yet it tends to calm the waters by engaging in measured, reasoned analysis — showing the nation that these are matters upon which people can have good-faith disagreements. But that culture of civility and mutual respect has been under attack in recent years,” Turley wrote. “Hyperbole seemed to border on hysteria in the Jackson dissent. The most junior justice effectively accused her colleagues of being toadies for tyranny.”

“Liberals who claim ‘democracy is dying’ seem to view democracy as getting what you want when you want it. It was, therefore, distressing to see Jackson picking up on the ‘No Kings’ theme, warning about drifting toward ‘a rule-of-kings governing system,’” Turley said. “She said that limiting the power of individual judges to freeze the entire federal government was ‘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 ‘minutiae’ dismissed by Jackson happen to be the statutory and constitutional authority of federal courts. It is the minutiae that distinguish the rule of law from mere judicial impulse.”

In National Review, Charles C.W. Cooke said “Congress and the Supreme Court must fill the hole left by Trump v. Casa.”

“As a matter of law, I am persuaded by the majority opinion in today’s Casa decision… As a matter of constitutional balance, however, I am less thrilled. This is not a contradiction. There is a difference between a court’s decision being legally correct and a court’s decision yielding perfect outcomes, and, from my perspective, this one is stronger on the first criterion than on the second,” Cooke wrote. “Like everyone else, I can of course see enormous upsides to a reduction in national injunctions — among them, stability, democratic accountability, and the neutering of activists wearing robes. But I can also see a good number of downsides.”

“Given that we all ought to wish to prevent the flowering of illegal presidential acts, [this ruling] does have a bearing on the other tools that we have at our disposal. The first of these is the legislative power itself… That being so, Congress should get busy removing a whole host of the delegations that have accreted since the New Deal,” Cooke said. “If Congress wishes, it can lay out exactly when and where those lower courts are permitted to issue national injunctions… In some circumstances, that is probably wise. But not in all. Now that the ball has been returned, Congress ought to think carefully about where it wishes to make exceptions.”

My take.

Reminder: “My take” is a section where I give myself space to share my own personal opinion. If you have feedback, criticism or compliments, don't unsubscribe. Write in by replying to this email, or leave a comment.

• The court didn’t do any of the extreme things partisans say it did.
• This ruling on universal injunctions was narrow, and I think the court got it right.
• Trump’s strategy of avoiding the birthright citizenship question is frustrating, but it may not work for much longer.

I’ll start by posing a simple question: What, exactly, did the court do here?

President Trump has called the ruling “a monumental victory” that paves the way for his agenda and validates his framing of universal injunctions as an attack on the administration by activist judges. Meanwhile, the left has framed it in equal and opposite terms: a catastrophic ruling that will allow Trump to do whatever he wants while sidelining the entirety of the judicial branch.

But… neither reaction seems accurate. On the podcast Advisory Opinions, legal experts Sarah Isgur, William Baude and Daniel Epps spent much more time explaining what the ruling didn’t do rather than what it did, breaking down how much more narrow its impact is than a lot of people think. The court completely ignored the basic question of birthright citizenship, but it barred the administration from enforcing its order for 30 days — which gives time for new challenges to arise, including (presumably) those that will meet the new standards to trigger a universal injunction (more on that in a second).

My frustration over this case boiled over a bit when we initially covered it in May. I want to repeat what I wrote then, because I still think it is the central story: 

The Trump administration knows it will lose the birthright citizenship case on the merits, so it is avoiding that fight altogether. That simple reality — that the administration is basically finding a way not to argue the real case here — is perpetually lost in all the noise. Both this strategy from the administration and the fact that we are all getting distracted by the other arguments are so frustrating to me that I am going to repeat this over and over today, just to make the most salient detail as clear as I possibly can: The Trump administration knows it will lose the birthright citizenship case on the merits, so it is avoiding that fight altogether.

I don’t want this to get lost in the noise again, but it inevitably will — although that makes more sense this time because the universal injunctions ruling is a story unto itself. Still, Trump is trying something blatantly unconstitutional that I’m confident the Supreme Court will not allow, though it is allowing this administration to use a little court gamesmanship to fight the fights they can win. Basically, the administration is not asking whether they overstepped the line but whether the courts are using the right tools to pull them back. I understand why this is happening, but it doesn’t make it any less frustrating (or alarming) that it's working.

With all that said, here’s my lukewarm (and not entirely unique) take: Using my typical two-part examination of the legal arguments and likely practical outcome of Supreme Court cases, I think this ruling is a win on both counts — precisely because it doesn’t do what either the Trump administration or its opponents are claiming. 

I’ve stipulated previously that universal injunctions create all kinds of obvious problems for both Republican and Democratic presidents. An administration could exercise its power in a way that almost every federal judge approves of, but if opponents can find one judge in 1,000 to disagree, they can stop the administration in its tracks — not just for a day or two, but potentially months or years. 

At the same time, barring all universal injunctions would open the door to authoritarian action and legal trickery that could invite more lawless presidencies. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor floated in oral arguments, one could imagine a president ordering the military to seize everyone’s firearms under the guise of addressing gun violence — was the administration really arguing that a single plaintiff or judge couldn’t block such an order with a timely universal injunction? And would citizens who lost their firearms have to wait until their individual cases made their way to the Supreme Court? 

The majority found a reasonable answer, which seems to limit universal injunctions without stopping them altogether. In the immediate term, the majority opinion left open the possibility that federal judges can issue universal injunctions when their absence would create what Justice Brett Kavanaugh called “an unworkable or intolerable patchwork” across states (such as, conveniently, with birthright citizenship). Barrett sent the case at hand back down to lower courts to “determine whether a narrower injunction here is appropriate.” 

The court further clarified that it still sees other kinds of challenges, like class-action lawsuits, as appropriate ways to trigger universal injunctions in the future. These lawsuits have more procedural hurdles to clear, but they’re still quite common, and until the 21st century were the most common way to trigger the kind of universal injunction we are discussing now. On top of that, Kavanaugh said that the Supreme Court could pick up some of the authority it limited to district courts by hearing more direct appeals for universal injunctions itself. Specifically, Kavanaugh said that when the Supreme Court is asked to intervene, it “should not and cannot hide in the tall grass,” but must “grant or deny” relief as a form of nationwide guidance until the issue is resolved. Whether his colleagues share that perspective remains unclear, but it would be a notable open door for plaintiffs seeking “complete relief.”

As Charles C.W. Cooke laid out in National Review (under “What the right is saying”), the ruling may also trigger some longer-term fixes. Congress could start by wresting some of its power back by scratching out the “reams of references to ‘the judgment of the president’ or ‘the opinion of the secretary’ and replace them with its own concrete terms,” specifically using its power to regulate federal courts and define when they can issue national injunctions. I know how hard it is to imagine Congress actually doing its job right now, but spurring that kind of action wouldn’t be a bad long-term outcome of this ruling. Remember: The Supreme Court did not say federal courts can’t issue these injunctions, it said “universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts.” In other words, courts likely don't have this power, which is granted by Congress. 

This ruling had a lot more to unpack — from Barrett’s surprisingly scathing (and probably deserved) criticism of Justice Jackson to the highly unusual six opinions written for this case — but I think the real takeaway is this: The court has narrowed, but not stripped, the power of U.S. district courts to issue universal injunctions. It has not unleashed presidential lawlessness, and in the future, its decision will benefit a lot of the people who are screaming from the rooftops now about unchecked executive power.

We obviously can’t declare this ruling’s lasting impact on executive power, but the Supreme Court gave Congress, state solicitors general, and even itself plenty of avenues to shape that impact in the future. Most interestingly, the order at the heart of this case — Trump’s blatantly unconstitutional attempt at ending birthright citizenship — is ripe for just the kind of universal injunction that the court has said it is open to considering; and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that challenge comes in the near future. 

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Your questions, answered.

Q: We hear so much about the humanitarian situation going on in Gaza, but so little about other global conflicts. I know that there’s a dire situation in Sudan, but I don’t know how bad it is or what is causing it. Can you explain what’s going on in Sudan?

— Anonymous from Syracuse, NY

Tangle: This is a very large question; so we’re going to devote the next three reader questions to explaining the current civil war in Sudan. 

Part One

Let’s start with some context. Sudan was under an international condominium ruled by Egypt and the United Kingdom from 1899–1956, when the state was eventually granted independence. The Arabic and Muslim north and the predominantly Christian and African south were ruled separately, deepening divisions in the country and leading to the country’s first civil war — a preemptive rebellion in 1955 from the south, whose population feared marginalization as the new country’s power centers were being gathered in the north (where the country’s capital, Khartoum, and its seat of international trade, Port Sudan, are located).

The First Sudanese Civil War lasted from 1955–1972 and resulted in an estimated 500,000–1,000,000 deaths, the majority of which were civilians. The war ended with the government agreeing to autonomy for the south, leading to a decade of peace and prosperity but setting the stage for a future war. 

After the discovery of oil in central Sudan in the late 1970s, and following a period of war amongst southern tribes, the Islamic fundamentalist President Gaafar Nimeiry established Sharia law in 1983. The act put an end to the southern autonomous region, and prompted the south to declare war.

What followed was one of the longest civil wars on record, one of the deadliest wars since World War II, and a disruption that the region is still feeling to this day. Approximately 2.5 million Sudanese died during the 22-year war (due to violence, famine, and disease), and roughly four million more south Sudanese civilians were displaced. Partway through the war, in 1989, military officer Omar al-Bashir seized power in Sudan through a coup, beginning one of the most infamous dictatorships of the late 20th century. And in 2003, a separate conflict within Sudan’s north broke out: the Darfur War. Al-Bashir’s government attacked the non-Arab population in Darfur, starting what the ICC has determined to be a genocide. The Darfur War did not officially end until 2020, though violence persists today.

The Second Sudanese Civil War ended with a peace agreement in Kenya in 2005, with oil-sharing and job-sharing agreements between the two sides. Furthermore, the north agreed to allow the south to once again self-govern and opt out of the north’s Sharia law, granting the south a six-year autonomous period before an independence vote. Then in 2011, South Sudan voted for independence. However, the region has continued to be plagued by violence. 

Reminder: This is part one of a three-part series on this question. Today we explained Sudan’s history, tomorrow we will look at how Sudan’s current war began, and on Wednesday we will discuss how the war has progressed. 

Want to have a question answered in the newsletter? You can reply to this email (it goes straight to our inbox) or fill out this form.

Under the radar.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said arrests of Iranian nationals living illegally in the United States increased in June, including 130 arrests last week. Furthermore, 670 Iranian nationals are currently being held in ICE detention centers. The uptick comes amid heightened concerns about a potential sleeper-cell attack following the United States’s airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, and the recent arrests reportedly include a former Iranian army sniper and another Iranian national who Department of Homeland Security officials say has admitted ties to Hezbollah. ICE Director Todd Lyons said that the aftermath of the U.S. strikes has prompted an increased focus on migrants from Iran, and he expects this “targeted enforcement” approach to continue. NewsNation has the story.

Numbers.

• 25. The number of nationwide injunctions issued during the first 100 days of the second Trump administration, according to a May 2025 CRS report. 
• 142. The number of executive orders issued by President Trump in the first 100 days of his second administration. 
• 86. The number of nationwide injunctions issued under the first Trump Administration, according to a March 2025 CRS report. 
• 36. The number of injunctions issued during the first Trump administration that dealt primarily with immigration, the most of any topic. 
• 23. The number of those injunctions that came from district courts in California. 
• 28. The number of nationwide injunctions issued under the Biden Administration.
• 8. The number of injunctions issued during the Biden administration that dealt primarily with immigration, the most of any topic.
• 10. The number of those injunctions that came from district courts in Texas.

The extras.

• One year ago today we had just covered Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s (D-NY) primary loss.
• The most clicked link in Thursday’s newsletter was, for the third-straight day, the Labubu craze.
• Nothing to do with politics: Thousands were mistakenly told they won millions in a Norwegian lottery error.
• Thursday’s survey: 2,472 readers responded to our survey on the Senate parliamentarian removing provisions from the “Big Beautiful Bill” with 57% saying her decisions didn’t go far enough. “The limitations for states to regulate AI should also be removed,” one respondent said.

Have a nice day.

E. coli is probably best known as an illness-causing bacterium, but scientists at the University of Edinburgh recently discovered it has another surprising ability. A compound of genetically modified E. coli transformed 92% of broken-down plastic waste into acetaminophen, the active ingredient in pain-relieving medications like Tylenol, in just 48 hours. Stephen Wallace, an engineering biologist at the University of Edinburgh, called the study “an exciting sort of starting point for plastic waste upcycling.” ScienceNews has the story.

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