Have I mentioned I hate omnibus bills? Oh yeah, I did when Biden did it and now I’m doing it again when Trump does it, because nobody knows what’s buried in its bowels. Like this:

No court of the United States may use appropriated funds to enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c), whether issued prior to, on, or subsequent to the date of enactment of this section.

Did anybody mention that the House Republicans snuck this gem into their Big Beautiful Bill? Well yes, Chicago Prawf Sam Bray mentioned it, and explained what’s wrong with it as well.

But the House Judiciary Committee’s bill is underinclusive, overinclusive, and likely unconstitutional.

Let’s start with underinclusive. The restriction in this bill is the easiest thing in the world to get around going forward: for a preliminary injunction or temporary restraining order in the future, all the bond has to be set for is $1. Which means that for these kinds of interim orders, the bill is not genuinely prospective legislation at all, but is instead an attempt to immunize defendants from contempt when they disobey previously granted preliminary injunctions and temporary restraining orders.

FRCP 65(c) provides that movants, except for the government, must post security for preliminary injunctions or temporary restraining orders.

The court may issue a preliminary injunction or a temporary restraining order only if the movant gives security in an amount that the court considers proper to pay the costs and damages sustained by any party found to have been wrongfully enjoined or restrained. The United States, its officers, and its agencies are not required to give security.

The trick is that courts can require that the security be zero, thus avoiding the problem of movants being required to post security when they lack the funds to otherwise do so. The bit in the BBB would require a non-zero amount of security, and one dollar (one cent?) will do. But the TROs already in force without any security would fail to suffice.

But that’s not all that’s wrong with this bit of buried treasure.

The bill is also grossly overinclusive, because nothing in this section is restricted to federal defendants. That means in every case in which a federal court has previously issued an injunction—whether it’s a school desegregation injunction that’s still on the books to an antitrust injunction against a tech company to an injunction against patent infringement in a suit between two private parties—it would now be open season for violations without any possibility of contempt enforcement. If that’s intended, it’s an evisceration of the results of the judicial process over decades.

Of course, as we’ve already seen with the Supreme Court’s vitiating of 90 years of precedent by overruling Humphrey’s Executor and voiding Congress’ efforts to create independent agencies and board, historical reliance isn’t a big problem for the Court. But there’s more!

Finally, the bill is probably unconstitutional as an attempt to interfere with the inherent power of a court of equity to enforce its decrees with contempt. In Michaelson v. U. S. ex rel. Chicago, St. P., M. & O. Ry. Co., 266 U.S. 42 (1924), the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of a statute that required jury trials in contempt proceedings. The key passage is pages 63-67. The Court construed the statute as applying only to prosecutions for criminal contempt, and not to summary contempt enforcement (e.g., a disturbance in a courtroom) or civil contempt enforcement (whether coercive or compensatory), since if the statute applied to those cases there would be a serious question about its constitutionality.

For the same reasons as with Humphrey’s Executor and Dobbs, the Court might not struggle too hard to ignore, distinguish or reverse its precedent. After all, it’s old, and here we are in a brave new world. Then again, since this has significant ramifications for lower courts’ ability to do much of anything to enforce its orders, perhaps the Supremes will have a greater appreciation of the implications of interfering with the inherent power of a court to be more than a joke.

But the big question is whether this was what people expected from Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, a graph hidden in its dark nether regions that would exculpate Trump’s failure to comply with what would be pedestrian court orders in any other administration so that the constitutional crisis that already exists even if no one wants to admit it will cease to be a problem. Is this what you thought Trump would do, eliminate the enforcement mechanism for contempt? Is this what you voted for, a president who could ignore the judicial branch of government with impunity because all those nasty laws and constitutional rights like due process just got in his way?