Democrats have launched a pre-planned, well-organized lawfare campaign against the Trump administration.
The NY Times reported in late November 2024 on the massive effort which was two-years in the making and in the immediate post-election period focused heavily on finding plaintiffs and lining up legal groups to challenge expected Trump policies:
More than 800 lawyers at 280 organizations have begun developing cases and workshopping specific challenges to what the group has identified as 600 “priority legal threats” — potential regulations, laws and other administrative actions that could require a legal response, its leaders said. The project, called Democracy 2025, aims to be a hub of opposition to the new Trump administration….Democracy Forward has spent the last two years working to identify the possible actions the new Trump administration could take on issues they see as key priorities to defend, the group’s leaders said, using as a blueprint Mr. Trump’s first-term actions, his campaign promises and plans released by his allies, including the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025 agenda….The flotilla of lawyers is preparing to challenge new regulations released by the Trump administration, even beginning the process of recruiting potential plaintiffs who would have legal standing in court.
We have seen the fruits of the lawfare planning in the opening three weeks of the Trump administration, with several dozen lawsuits filed, and many (not all) district court judges willing at least to grant temporary restraining orders, incuding one ex parte TRO issued by an emergency duty judge at 1 a.m. last Saturday morning that by its terms removed political appointee control of Treasury payment systems. (That TRO was scaled back by the judge permanently assigned to the case, and is under review by her in a ruling expected soon.) It may be that the short-term TROs are not extended to longer-term preliminary injunctions, and if that happens the “crisis” may solve itself, but I’m not hopeful.
Here is my ‘hot take’ on how the lawfare, not the Trump administration, is creating the real ‘constitutional crisis’. This is a short excerpt from my much longer (almost 20 minute) explanation as part of the podcast we just posted.
(Transcript auto-generated, may contain transcription errors, lightly edited for transcript clarity, video previously edited)
The Democrats’ strategy throughout the country now, but mostly in blue States, is to get the federal judiciary to usurp the executive powers of the executive branch and that’s what this is all about. It’s a very dangerous ploy. These judges should not be entertaining it but in multiple cases they have, and they’ve issued temporary restraining orders on a whole host of issues that really amount to political policy issues.This is the problem. If the federal judges really want to run the executive branch then the executive branch should be in their courtrooms two to three times a day asking the judges to make decisions and the judges are going to regret that.The Democrats love to scream about a constitutional crisis. There is no constitutional crisis other than the Democrats lost. They are trying to create a constitutional crisis by having the judiciary and the federal district courts assume control of the executive branch.So that’s where we’re heading. it’s going to come to a head. I hope this one or more of these cases get to the Supreme Court very soon because we as a country need to know moving forward, with a new president who won not only the electoral college but the popular vote, whether he’s going to be able to run the executive branch or whether it’s going to be run by federal judges. We need to know that right now.What needs to happen is you need to get these things out of the hands of the district courts and into the hands of the Courts of appeal, and in the hands hopefully of the Supreme Court. It’s only going to take the Supreme Court once or twice slapping down these judges with these crazy rulings for the message to get out. But it really needs to get out sooner rather than later, otherwise we’re going to be paralyzed, which is what the Democrats want. We will have a paralyzed executive branch where federal district courts are being asked to make policy judgments.Democrats can throw a wrench into the gears a little bit with the federal courts, but at the end of the day a popular president controlling Congress and controlling the massive Federal bureaucracy is going to be able to get most of this stuff done, it just may not be in the first month, it may take longer.
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