Federal district judges aren’t emperors for the whole United States. Congress and the Supreme Court should both remind them of that reality.

By issuing putatively national injunctions, Attorney General William Barr said in a May 21 speech to the American Law Institute: “One judge can, in effect, cancel the policy with the stroke of the pen. No official in the United States government [rightly] can exercise that kind of nationwide power, with the sole exception of the president. And the Constitution subjects him to nationwide election, among other constitutional checks, as a prerequisite to wielding that power.”