David Cole, the ACLU’s national legal director, said the reason there have been so many suits over Trump’s actions is simple: “He’s attempting to deliver on his campaign promises, but many of them violate the Constitution. If he follows through on these things, we will see him in court.”
Banding Together
David Goldston, director of government affairs at the National Resources Defense Council, said environmental groups have historically banded together over common interests. Those efforts have intensified because of the election of Trump and a Republican-majority Congress. The NRDC sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Feb. 1 over a Trump administration directive to abandon a soon-to-be-published regulation limiting toxic metals discharged into the environment by dentists.
Goldston said the group’s next move will be dictated by Trump’s actions, but he suggested one area was particularly fertile for legal challenges: the president’s decree that agencies drop two old regulations for every new one, which he called “problematic both in theory and in operation.”
Adding to the chorus of litigants are some of the nation’s most active and well-financed state attorneys general, including New York’s Eric Schneiderman and California’s Xavier Becerra, who was just sworn in as the state’s top cop.
Seventeen of them participated in statements condemning the president’s immigration order, with Washington filing its own lawsuit and Massachusetts, New York and Virginia signing on to existing cases.
Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen is leading a 16-member group defense of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and its director, former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray, a Democrat whose job and agency is threatened by court rulings and Republican critics.
Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a Washington-based conservative group that pressed a series of lawsuits to force the release of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, said liberals have a well-funded infrastructure that uses the courts to impose policies they can’t enact through Congress. Fitton said conservatives have nothing to compare to the left’s "legal machinery.”
“The left pretends that disagreements on policy mean their opponents are doing something illegal,” said Fitton, who said liberal groups also benefit from friendly government workers and a sympathetic media. He said his group is monitoring the suits against Trump and “may take steps to enter the litigations on the side of the rule of law.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.