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 limiting the power of federal judges to issue broad orders blocking Trump’s policies from taking effect while the lawsuits challenging them make their way through the courts. The case, Trump v. CASA, involved one of the most blatantly unconstitutional of Trump’s orders: his bid to revoke, by executive fiat, the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship. But the implications of the ruling extend far beyond that single issue. 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. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it in her dissent, “its decision is nothing less than an open invitation for the Government to bypass the Constitution.”

This outcome was as unnecessary as it was unwise. Witness the victory lap that President Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi took in the White House briefing room after the ruling was released. Trump crowed that the Court had defused a “grave threat to democracy,” in which “a handful of radical left judges effectively try to overrule the rightful powers of the president.” Bondi, for her part, decried “rogue judges striking down President Trump’s policies” through “lawless injunctions” that let district-court judges act as “emperors.”

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. Birthright citizenship was the rule before it was written into the Fourteenth Amendment. (The departure that necessitated constitutional protection was the Court’s infamous 1857 holding in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which held that people of African descent “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution.”) And the language of the Amendment is clear: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” (The caveat—“subject to the jurisdiction”—is a carve out for the children of diplomats and other minor exceptions.) That guarantee has been codified in federal law; it was affirmed in an 1898 ruling in the case of Wong Kim Ark, the U.S.-born son of Chinese immigrants. “The Amendment, in clear words and in manifest intent, includes the children born within the territory of the United States of all other persons, of whatever race or color, domiciled within the United States,” the Court said in that case, and subsequent rulings have repeated that conclusion. No surprise, then, that three district-court judges reviewing the executive order had little trouble finding that the edict was probably unconstitutional, and that three appeals courts that reviewed their work left intact their rulings blocking the order from taking effect. Equally telling, the Supreme Court majority said not a word about the legality of the order itself.

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. Sotomayor’s dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, raised the prospect that Trump’s order “may even wrench newborns from the arms of parents lawfully in the United States, for it purports to strip citizenship from the children of parents legally present on a temporary basis.” If this warning sounds overblown, let me introduce you to the White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller. And this gets to why the consequences of Trump v. CASA reverberate beyond birthright citizenship. “No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates,” Sotomayor warned. “Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law-abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship.” Sotomayor had more hypotheticals in her arsenal. “Suppose an executive order barred women from receiving unemployment benefits or black citizens from voting. Is the Government irreparably harmed, and entitled to emergency relief, by a district court order universally enjoining such policies?” she asked. “The majority, apparently, would say yes.” Those unlikely scenarios underscore the scary implications of the Court’s approach, but the real-world consequences of Friday’s decision are undeniable. They span the landscape of Trump’s executive orders and other actions, including efforts to impose more stringent voter-identification requirements, relocate transgender women prisoners to male facilities, and freeze foreign aid.

The majority got the balance dangerously wrong, but there is a legitimate debate over the proper reach of what are called “universal” or “nationwide” injunctions. Democratic and Republican Presidents have chafed at orders from district-court judges, often cherry-picked by plaintiffs for their demonstrated sympathies, that prevent policies from being implemented across the country, sometimes for years. “Look, there are all kinds of abuses of nationwide injunctions,” Kagan said at the oral argument in the birthright case last month, and the dissent acknowledged that “there may be good reasons not to issue universal injunctions in the typical case.” But the birthright citizenship order was particularly ill-suited to serve as a vehicle for curbing such injunctions. The order itself is likely doomed. The government’s argument that the injunctions were causing it irreparable harm is unconvincing; leaving in place what has been the rule for centuries is no hardship. And the government’s proposed alternative—that the injunctions keeping birthright-citizenship protections in place apply only to the individual plaintiffs, not to a broader group of those affected—makes little sense in the context of citizenship, which should be decided on a national basis, not relegated to a haphazard patchwork dictated by circumstances of geography or the capacity to secure a lawyer. As the dissenters put it, “This is not a scenario where granting universal relief will encourage forum shopping or give plaintiffs the upper hand. Quite the opposite: By awarding universal relief below, the District Courts just ordered the Government to do everywhere what any reasonable jurist would order the Government to do anywhere.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for the majority, ruled that courts must limit themselves to orders that deal with the disputes immediately before them; they may not rove beyond the case at hand to resolve issues for those who aren’t parties to it. At oral argument, Barrett had seemed to express some exasperation with the government’s position, so it was disappointing to see her in the majority. But Barrett left open the possibility that the states challenging the birthright order could prove they needed the broader relief of a blanket ban, leaving that question to lower courts to determine. She also suggested that those challenging Administration orders had another option: they could file their suits as class actions. This would be more comforting if the Court in recent years had not made it more difficult for plaintiffs to obtain class-action status and if the Solicitor General, D. John Sauer, had not said that the government would probably oppose granting class status, at least in the context of birthright citizenship. Then there is the concurring opinion in Friday’s case by Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas; they warned that “district courts should not view today’s decision as an invitation to certify nationwide classes without scrupulous adherence to the rigors” of its requirements. In other words, don’t count on class actions to rein in Administrations bent on abusing the law.

Given Congress’s abdication of its constitutional role, the courts remain the best immediate vehicle for combatting Trump’s excesses. (Elections are a better solution, but they remain far off.) With Friday’s ruling, though, they are unnecessarily handcuffed. If there is one thing we have learned during the five long months of the second Trump Administration, it is how easy it is to inflict damage on programs and institutions, and how hard that damage is to repair. This is an example of the Court stripping its own branch of power, and at the worst possible moment. ♦