Sessions calls on US lawyers to fight against national injunctions

Attorney General Jeff Sessions calls on US lawyers to aggressively challenge lower court injunctions that hinder Trump's administration policy nationally, after key elements of the president's agenda, such as his ban on to travel, have been held before the courts.

Sessions issued an orientation note asking federal lawyers to argue that such injunctions at the national level are unconstitutional and make governance virtually impossible. National injunctions, in which a single federal district court makes a ruling that applies to the entire United States, have frozen the implementation of the law. travel ban of the president executive orders and his attempt to dissolve the Deferred Action Program for Child Arrivals (DACA).

Without much legislative recourse in Congress, Democrats and anti-President groups have often turned to litigation, reports CBS News' Paula Reid. The sessions, announcing the policy change in a speech Thursday in Kansas City, said in a statement that "judicial activism" has occurred under other jurisdictions, but has aggravated under Mr. Trump.

"More and more, we are finding that federal district judges go beyond the parties in court to issue injunctions or orders that prevent the federal government from enforcing a law or policy across the country." "This type of judicial activism did not happen once in our first 175 years as a nation, but it has become common in recent years." He arrived at the administration Trump 25 times in less than two years. "

"This trend must stop, we have a government to govern, and the Constitution does not give a district judge the power to veto the executive's actions vis-à-vis the parties." The abuse of judicial power is against the law, and with these new guidelines, this department will continue to fight against it. "

Specifically, the Sessions memorandum directs American lawyers to argue before the judges that national injunctions do not conform to the constitutional limits on the judiciary; that they have no historical foundation in judicial practice; that they prevent other courts from debating the law; and that they interfere with judgments belonging to the executive branch and the Congress.

Sessions has long expressed frustration with the injunctions putting an end to the Trump administration's policy, perhaps especially when he lamented that one "judge sitting on a Pacific island can issue an order that prevents the President of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and constitutional power. The Attorney General later stated that his comment on a federal judge in Hawaii had been misinterpreted.

– Report by Paula Reid