HAMMER: America Is Better Off For Having Bill Barr

U.S. Attorney General William “Bill” Barr has been making quite a name for himself over the past couple of months.

Last month, the attorney general, following the lead of Vice President Mike Pence, tore into the erroneous notion that so-called “nationwide injunctions” are an appropriate judicial remedy in our constitutional order. The practice of Article III federal judges issuing so-called “nationwide injunctions,” Barr averred, “flouts constitutional principles and stultifies sound judicial administration, all at the cost of public confidence in our institutions.” In so doing, the attorney general thus took the same position on the constitutional unsoundness of “nationwide injunctions” that Justice Clarence Thomas took in his lone Trump v. Hawaii concurrence from June 2018. Justice Thomas may have gone solo in Trump — it is worth emphasizing that not a single other purportedly conservative justice joined Thomas’s concurrence that doubted the constitutionality of “nationwide injunctions” — but the attorney general of the United States is now on record as wholly agreeing with him.