'SEE YOU IN COURT:' Trump's vow proves prophetic

WASHINGTON — President Trump has yet to sign a Republican health care bill, but New York’s attorney general vowed this week to challenge it in court.

The same day, a government watchdog group urged a federal judge to block Trump’s voter fraud commission from gathering sensitive state data.

Environmental groups were busy as well. The latest in a flurry of lawsuits aimed at the new administration protested its extension of fishing privileges in federal waters, which endangers red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico.

From the six-month-old administration's point of view, it was just another day fighting what Neil Gorsuch — long before he became Trump's choice for the Supreme Court — called liberals’ “overweening addiction to the courtroom as the place to debate social policy.”

But the daily legal battles — from immigration and education to religious freedom and regulatory reform — are threatening to subsume Trump's policy agenda, if not his presidency. His Feb. 9 vow to "SEE YOU IN COURT," after one in a series of legal setbacks for his immigrant and refugee travel ban, has proved prophetic in reverse.

The sheer number of lawsuits presents a challenge for Justice Department lawyers, who must respond to them all. On a single day in March, the government's point man in the travel ban case, acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall, was forced to defend the policy in two federal courts nearly 5,000 miles apart — in person in Maryland, by phone in Hawaii.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, one of many aggressive environmental groups, is involved in 27 cases challenging Trump administration policies, from its easing of restrictions on mercury and methane pollution to the status of the rusty patched bumble bee.

"That's about one a week, and it's going to accelerate," says Mitch Bernard, the group's chief counsel. On Thursday, the group sued over potential vulnerabilities at a uranium processing plant in Tennessee.

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed 26 lawsuits on the travel ban alone. The group also is in court over the government's threat to withhold federal funds from immigrant-friendly sanctuary cities, and it's defending Iraqi nationals facing deportation in Detroit and a Somali-American family detained at the Canadian border. 

American Oversight, a watchdog group created in March to press for greater government transparency and accountability, has filed 11 lawsuits seeking information on topics ranging from the potential costs of Trump's planned border wall to his claim of being wiretapped at Trump Tower in New York last year. 

States v. Feds

Democratic attorneys general from Maine to Hawaii have taken a leading role in the legal onslaught, just as their Republican counterparts did in challenging President Barack Obama's signature achievements on health care, immigration and environmental regulation.

"I go into the office, I sue the federal government, and I go home," Texas's Republican governor, Greg Abbott, said in describing his job as the state's attorney general in 2013.

Four years later, Democratic attorneys general have been quick to file lawsuits on the travel ban, as well as the Education Department's delay in helping students who took out fraudulent loans and the Energy Department's delay of energy efficiency standards.

To succeed like other litigants, states must show they will be harmed, often economically, by the policies they're challenging. Texas, for instance, led a group of states with Republican governors who beat back Obama's order easing immigration rules for parents by citing the need to pay for processing new driver's licenses.

“The state attorneys general are in a terrific position to bring these lawsuits, to try to check the federal government," says Raymond Brescia, an Albany Law School professor who has studied the trend. "They have the resources to do this.” 

Many of the lawsuits have been triggered by Trump's effort to reverse actions taken by his predecessor. "The administration came in very aggressively to dismantle a lot of the framework for environmental and human health protection," Bernard says. "The most effective way to resist that is through litigation.”

If unsuccessful at repealing Obamacare, Trump has talked about letting it collapse. That could lead to a lawsuit based on the Take Care Clause of the Constitution, which requires that the president "take care that the laws be faithfully executed."

“Donald Trump doesn’t follow the rule of law," says Sean Rankin, executive director of the Democratic Attorneys General Association. "This is not something that we’ve seen before.”

'Constitutional crisis'

That was the theme of a panel discussion Wednesday featuring the litigators behind three lawsuits that accuse Trump of profiting as president from his private businesses, which may violate the Constitution's Emoluments Clause. The first of them was filed on Jan. 23 at 9 a.m. — the first business day following Trump's inauguration.

"We believe he's creating an unprecedented constitutional crisis," said District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine, who filed one of the lawsuits along with Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh.

Neither the White House nor the Justice Department would comment on the rash of ongoing litigation, much of which is triggered by Freedom of Information Act requests that go unanswered. 

Occasionally, those lawsuits result in quick victories. The administration recently agreed to turn over visitor logs for Trump's Mar-a-Lago retreat in Palm Beach, Fla. One of the litigants, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said it would release the logs publicly when they're received in September.

Another watchdog group, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, is among four groups challenging Trump's fledgling voter fraud commission. It's also seeking to make public the intelligence agencies' report on Russian interference in last year's election, as well as Trump's tax returns.

Other groups suing over the new commission include the ACLU, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the NAACP Legal and Educational Defense Fund, which claims the panel's purpose is to discriminate against minorities. 

Those at the bottom of the nation's social and economic ladder — immigrants, refugees, students, consumers — are among those who stand to benefit from the lawsuits.

“These are often populations that don’t have a lobbyist," says American Oversight's executive director, Austin Evers. "Sometimes, courts are the only avenue to protect them.”