No Rogue Rulings Act of 2025

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHMIDT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from California for bringing us this important piece of legislation.

I haven't been here very long in this body, but I have learned something, and it is amplified today. That is that this town has a remarkable ability to snatch disagreement out of the jaws of consensus. This is an issue that liberal thinkers and conservative thinkers have both said is a problem that we ought to address.

Justice Kagan has been quoted widely as having said that it just cannot be the case that a single district court judge can hold up Federal policy for the lengthy period of time nationwide that it takes for the ordinary appeals process to run.

On the other end, Justice Gorsuch has suggested that these nationwide injunctions bear a remarkable similarity to a step in the legislative, not judicial, process.

In our branch of government, we had Democrats in both bodies of the legislative branch who proposed legislation just a Congress ago saying this is a problem we ought to deal with. Their legislation looked a lot like part of this bill, three-judge panels. Now, we have Republicans saying the same thing.

We ought to agree this is just the right thing to do as a matter of public policy, not because of who is in the White House or who is the plaintiff bringing a particular lawsuit.

Look, district courts are supposed to resolve disputes between litigants. If we adopt this thing and make it law, there is no doubt any citizen who can walk into court today can still walk into court and get relief for anything they are entitled to relief for. What they can't do is get a district court judge to order that an entire Federal policy nationwide be disabled.

There is still a relief valve because we added an amendment in committee that allows States to go into court to seek that type of nationwide relief. Why? It is because States are unique. It is not the national association of people who lost last year's election. It is a State organized under our Constitution that has a unique role in our Federal system and an interest in nationwide relief.

We ought to adopt this bill and do what everybody agrees is the right thing.

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