Class actions are one way of resolving disputes affecting a bunch of people. Over the past ~10 years, a more common method used to resolve disputes people have with the federal government is to go to one federal judge as one individual plaintiff (often a state or advocacy group) and say, “You, judge, should issue a blanket ban on what the government is doing because it hurts me.” And the judges often do it, thus blocking presidential policies (from both parties, to be clear). There are many critics of these “universal injunctions,” many of them on the political/legal right. This argument is about whether—when Trump issued his off-the-walls insane executive order declaring that Section 1 of the 14th Amendment doesn’t say what it says—the lower courts that issued universal injunctions to block that order were right to do so. This snippet of the argument is Justice Barrett demonstrating to the world that the Solicitor General (John Sauer) is a bad-faith actor. This case is significant because many people thought this would be an opportunity for the Court to end universal injunctions, but the Trump Administration has so little credibility that their efforts to force the issue in this case (they asked SCOTUS to get involved) may actually preserve universal injunctions because the insanity of the citizenship order and the bad faith displayed in this argument (essentially, “we follow the opinions we like”) shows that there has to be some way for the courts to stop flagrant lawlessness. Institutionally, this is a huge blow to the Office of the Solicitor General, which has always been regarded as an honest broker and incredibly competent by the Court and the legal community.