The US Supreme Court delivered a significant win to President Donald Trump on Friday by limiting the authority of individual federal judges to block executive actions.

In a 6-3 decision related to Trump’s attempt to terminate birthright citizenship, the court stated that nationwide injunctions issued by lower courts “likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to federal courts."

However, the Supreme Court has not yet made a decision on whether Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship is constitutional, according to reports.

The majority agreed to stop these broad injunctions, but “only to the extent that the injunctions are broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue."

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for the majority, said, “Some say that the universal injunction ‘give[s] the Judiciary a powerful tool to check the Executive Branch.’"

But she explained that federal courts are not meant to oversee the entire executive branch, only to handle legal disputes within the limits set by Congress.

“When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too," she wrote.

In a strong dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor condemned the government’s attempt to reject birthright citizenship and criticised her conservative colleagues for “shamefully" allowing judicial “gamesmanship" by the Trump administration.

She explained that birthright citizenship—the idea that anyone born in the US is a citizen—was “ratified in 1868 [in] the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, which enshrined birthright citizenship in the Constitution."

Her dissent was supported by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

“There it has remained, accepted and respected by Congress, by the Executive, and by this Court. Until today," Sotomayor wrote.

Source: News18