Democrats' Hot New Legal Strategy is to Use Conservative Wins Against Trump

[Celerity]

“You go to war with the tools you have, not the tools you want,” one legal scholar said of Democratic attorneys general using legal theories they hate to challenge Donald Trump.

https://www.notus.org/courts/democrats-conservative-legal-strategy-trump

https://archive.ph/xuFLM



When the Department of Health and Human Services tried to claw back more than $10 billion in public health grants earlier this year, 20 blue-state attorneys general sued by pointing to the “major questions doctrine,” a Supreme Court precedent Democrats have otherwise lambasted and conservatives have long embraced. The strategy worked, at least temporarily. A district judge issued an injunction siding with the states in mid-May, pointing, in part, to the major questions doctrine argument.

The precedent — which limits the power of executive branch agencies and was regularly used by the right against former President Joe Biden — was affirmed by the Supreme Court in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency in 2022. It was strengthened by last year’s Loper Bright decision, which severely hampered an agency’s ability to interpret ambiguous laws.

Both Supreme Court rulings were massive wins for the conservative legal movement and were, in large part, thanks to a court packed with Donald Trump’s nominees. Now, Democrats see the legal landscape Trump paved in his first term as a weapon they can try to exploit against him.

“With these right-wing doctrines, it’s as far as they want to go; it doesn’t depend on anything the left does,” Craig Green, an administrative law professor at Temple University, told NOTUS. “This is the argument that an attorney general might use to say, ‘We gotta use what we can.’ You go to war with the tools you have, not the tools you want.”

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