In what is likely to be one of her final actions as the federal government’s top Supreme Court litigator, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar asked the justices last week to significantly diminish the power of lower court judges to block federal laws and policies. Should the Court take her up on this invitation, the biggest immediate beneficiary is likely to be President-elect Donald Trump, because the Court’s decision would limit judges’ ability to halt Trump administration policies, even if those policies are illegal.

The case is known as Garland v. Texas Top Cop Shop, and the stakes are potentially enormous. In it, a federal trial judge, relying on highly dubious reasoning, struck down a federal law requiring many businesses to disclose their owners to the federal government. If the Supreme Court were to uphold this judge’s reasoning, that would be a constitutional earthquake, as the trial judge’s opinion attacks Congress’s broad power to regulate businesses and the economy.

That outcome is probably unlikely, however, because the trial judge’s opinion is poorly argued.

Yet, even assuming that the Court does not use this case to drastically rework the balance of power between Congress and private businesses, the stakes in Top Cop Shop are still quite high. That’s because the trial judge in this case, Amos Mazzant, issued a “nationwide injunction” preventing the federal government from enforcing the ownership-reporting law against anyone at all. Now the Court might limit the power of low-ranking federal judges like Mazzant to issue decisions that make rules for the nation as a whole.

The question of whether a single federal trial judge should have the power to halt a federal law or policy throughout the entire country is hotly contested. As Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in a 2020 opinion arguing against nationwide injunctions, “there are currently more than 1,000 active and senior district court judges, sitting across 94 judicial districts, and subject to review in 12 regional courts of appeal.” If nationwide injunctions are allowed, any one of these district judges could potentially halt any federal law, even if every other judge in the country disagrees with them.

The problem is particularly acute in Texas’s federal courts (Mazzant sits in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas), where local rules often allow plaintiffs to

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