The Democrats cried foul for eight long years as Republicans tried to keep President Obama from implementing every word of his far-left, radical agenda. They called them obstructionists, racists, and every other name in the book. This isn’t the way you govern as the minority party, they insisted to anyone who would listen.
And now they’re doing the exact same thing.
In fact, they’re going quite a bit further. Not only are they using their limited power in Washington to hold the Trump agenda at bay, they are having even more success using state Attorneys General in a lawsuit frenzy against the administration. Never mind that they have almost no legal basis for launching these lawsuits. As long as they have liberal judges willing to stray FAR from the Constitution in their quest to “defeat” this president, they can keep Trump’s agenda tied up in judicial hell for years.
Fox News covered the frenzy in a fine piece of reporting this week:
The Democratic Attorneys General Association (DAGA), a political fundraising group, touts the AGs as “the first line of defense” against Trump’s agenda.
“The Trump administration has trouble understanding the rule of law and that’s the reason Democratic attorneys general are filing lawsuits and winning them,” Sean Rankin, DAGA’s executive director, told Fox News.
[…]
Throughout 2017, Democratic attorneys generals filed 35 multistate lawsuits against the Trump administration, according to tracking by Paul Nolette, a political science professor at Marquette University and author of “Federalism on Trial: State Attorneys General and National Policymaking in Contemporary America.”
By contrast, Republican attorneys general brought 46 multistate legal challenges during all of former President Barack Obama’s two terms.
This proves, of course, that these lawsuits are being filed using political money and for political purposes. The fundraising group will of course say that the state lawsuits they’re funding have merit, but there’s a serious question as to whether that’s true…or whether that’s even relevant. These states aren’t filing suit because the president is breaking the law; they’re filing them because it’s their role in the so-called Resistance. They’re filing them, secondarily, so a bunch of Democrats in Attorney General positions can get famous and boost their careers off confronting Trump.
So far, even though some of these major rulings have already been overturned by the higher courts, the scheme appears to be working. Hopefully that will end when the Supreme Court decides on the travel ban and other pertinent issues, including Trump’s authority to withhold money from sanctuary cities. That’s fine, but lawmakers need to look into what can be done to draw a stricter line between politics and the judiciary, because what’s going on right now makes a mockery of our entire system of law.
