Mike Johnson Touts Legislation To Limit Federal Injunctions: ‘It Violates Equal Justice Under Law’

2 days ago

During the House Republican leadership press briefing on Tuesday, Speaker Johnson discussed imposing limitations on judicial power.

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Transcript

00:00So, yeah. Nice one. Yeah.

00:02On judicial impeachments, you have a lot of resolutions that are in front of you right now.

00:07I know your focus is on budget reconciliation.

00:09Is your plan to bring up these impeachment resolutions that have been brought forward?

00:12And if you do, are you concerned this will stall any progress that you want to make with regards to budget reconciliation?

00:17We're working with the Judiciary Committee, which is the appropriate area of jurisdiction for that.

00:22I talked to Chairman Jordan this morning about it.

00:24And they'll be having a hearing early next week, I believe, to highlight these abuses.

00:29Let me just say this, and I know that you all have seen the numbers, but this is a serious problem.

00:33I used to be a litigator. I was a constitutional law attorney.

00:35I used to litigate all these cases for 20 years.

00:37Routinely, I would have activist judges issue opinions against me, and I would go get them overturned on appeal.

00:43That is the process.

00:44But something is happening right now that has not happened before.

00:47In the last 100 years—listen to this—67% of the injunctions issued against a president were issued against one president alone, and that's Donald J. Trump.

00:5667% of the injunctions over the last 100 years, okay? That's a problem.

01:0192% of those were issued by judges who were known or accused of being partisan, you know, Democrat appointees to the court.

01:08So something unusual is happening, something that is out of the norm.

01:12It is a dangerous trend, and it violates equal justice under law, that critical principle.

01:17It violates our system itself.

01:20It violates separation of powers when a judge thinks that they can enjoin something that a president is doing that the American people voted for.

01:27That is not what the founders intended.

01:28So there's a natural tension between the branches of the government, and we're working through that.

01:34The Judiciary Committee is looking at alternatives.

01:36One of the bills that I really like that's already been through committee was authored by Representative Daryl Issa,

01:41and that would limit the scope of federal injunctions, the ability of one individual judge to abuse the system in this way.

01:48And it would be, in my view, a dramatic improvement on that.

01:51So we'll be moving, I think, that piece of legislation and some others to address it

01:55because we have an Article I authority under the Constitution to do that.

01:58We do have authority over the federal courts, as you know.

02:01We can eliminate an entire district court.

02:03We have power funding over the courts and all these other things.

02:07But desperate times call for desperate measures, and Congress is going to act.

02:10So stay tuned for that.

Mike Johnson Touts Legislation To Limit Federal Injunctions: ‘It Violates Equal Justice Under Law’

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