The Trump administration is fighting to kill 40 court orders blocking its new policies.
- Solicitor General John Sauer urged the Supreme Court to halt nationwide injunctions against Trump policies but said if class-action lawsuits took their place, he would oppose them too.
- Legal experts said if the Supreme Court abolishes nationwide injunctions, Trump could cut his losses by limiting the reach of court rulings that go against him.
As the Trump administration fights to kill 40 court orders blocking some of his most controversial or aggressive new policies, legal experts say the government’s strategy is to break the cases apart, into individual disputes, to delay an eventual reckoning at the Supreme Court.
One called President Donald Trump’s legal strategy a “shell game.” Another said government lawyers were “throwing spaghetti against the wall” to see what sticks.
“Their bottom line is that they don’t think these cases should be in court in the first place,” said Luke McCloud, a lawyer at Williams and Connolly who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Brett Kavanaugh when he was on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. “They are looking for a procedural mechanism that will make it the most challenging to bring these sorts of cases.”
