(The Daily Signal)—The Supreme Court case Trump v. CASA cut right to the heart of the judicial insurrection, the trend of district court judges siding with leftist activists to block President Donald Trump’s policies through nationwide preliminary injunctions.
The court’s decision rightly struck down the judicial insurrection’s number one strategy, but that doesn’t mean rogue judges won’t find ways to block Trump’s attempt to keep his promises to the American people.
“Traditionally, courts issued injunctions prohibiting executive officials from enforcing a challenged law or policy only against the plaintiffs in the lawsuit,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the court’s 6-3 majority. Yet nationwide or “universal” injunctions aim to block policies from impacting anyone.
Barrett ruled that since “nothing like a universal injunction was available at the founding,” nationwide injunctions violate the 1789 Judiciary Act.
Among other things, Barrett noted that these injunctions “operate asymmetrically,” with a plaintiff needing to win “just one suit to secure sweeping relief,” while the administration “must win everywhere.”
Many of the same groups that staffed and advised the Biden administration (which I expose in “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government”) have filed lawsuits to block Trump’s policies, choosing jurisdictions with more friendly judges in order to secure injunctions.
Barrett’s ruling marks a key win against such strategies, but the court’s opinion leaves open two ways for judges to block Trump’s policies, and the judicial insurrection has already tested a third strategy not condoned by the court.
Class Action Lawsuits
The court’s ruling did not affect class action lawsuits. Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure lays out circumstances in which many people can band together as a “class” to pursue a legal claim, and if a judge certifies the class, he or she may impose an injunction protecting the class.
“Putting the kibosh on universal injunctions does nothing to disrupt Rule 23’s requirements,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in a concurring opinion.
He warned, however, that “district courts should not view today’s decision as an invitation to certify nationwide classes without scrupulous adherence to the rigors of Rule 23.”
If judges do so, Alito warned, “the universal injunction will return from the grave under the guise of ‘nationwide class relief,’ and today’s decision will be of little more than minor academic interest.”
Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal that he suspects “these same judges will simply willy nilly certify classes of plaintiffs to get around this, ignoring the strict criteria that applies through the federal rule on class certification.”
“The Justice Department will then be right back in the courts of appeal, but this time disputing the legitimacy of the judges’ class certifications,” he noted.
The Administrative Procedure Act
The Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 also provides a way for district court judges to block administration policies.
A footnote in Barrett’s ruling notes that “nothing we say today resolves the distinct question whether the Administrative Procedure Act authorizes federal courts to vacate federal agency action.”
Under 5 U.S. Code Section 706, a court reviewing federal agency action “shall … compel agency action unlawfully withheld or unreasonably delayed; and hold unlawful and set aside agency action, findings, and conclusions to be” in one way or another “not in accordance with law.”
The Supreme Court has not laid out clear precedent about the limits of courts’ ability to vacate agency action under the Administrative Procedure Act. If left-wing groups bring such lawsuits against the Trump administration, these cases may end up before the nation’s highest court.
Defying the Supreme Court
District court judges may also flatly defy the Supreme Court’s clear ruling against nationwide injunctions. It sounds insane, but I frankly can’t rule it out because it has already happened.
Last week, Massachusetts-based District Judge Brian Murphy openly defied the court. He had issued a temporary injunction on April 18, blocking the Trump administration from deporting illegal aliens to South Sudan. He issued a follow-up order on May 21, clarifying and enforcing the injunction.
The Supreme Court struck down his April 18 order on June 23, but he issued another order that same day, stating that the May 21 order remained in effect.
The Department of Homeland Security condemned Murphy’s “unprecedented defiance” of the Supreme Court, but his action makes a perverse kind of sense in the context of a judicial insurrection where judges take upon themselves the authority of the president of the United States.
An Ongoing Issue
While Trump v. CASA likely puts an end to nationwide preliminary injunctions at the district court level, Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted in his concurring opinion that the question remains whether “a major new federal statute, rule, or executive order can be enforced throughout the United States during the several-year interim period until its legality is finally decided on the merits.”
Kavanaugh noted that district courts may “grant or deny the functional equivalent of a universal injunction.” Nonprofits and the government may appeal the cases all the way to the Supreme Court, and he urged that the court “cannot hide in the tall grass.” On these issues, “it is often important for reasons of clarity, stability, and uniformity that this court be the decider.”
Kavanaugh noted that Trump v. CASA “will require district courts to follow proper legal procedures” when considering orders, and that’s a clear step toward sanity.
But mark my words, the judicial insurrection is far from over.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
