Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison: 'We are a whisper away from Jim Crow'

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: Yahoo! News

Wed, June 4, 2025 at 9:05 PM EDT


When President Donald Trump’s performance in the polls in 2024 signaled a possible re-election, Keith Ellison and fellow Democratic attorneys general read Project 2025 and started getting ready, especially when Trump hired the key author of the planning document after his election. They divided the documents into sections and marshaled their staff lawyers to be ready with lawsuits.

So when Russell Vought and the Office of Management and Budget froze the distribution of certain federal funds — as outlined in Project 2025 — Ellison and other the Democratic AGs were ready. They sued over the funding freeze the next day. “They were not hiding the ball,” Ellison said in a wide-ranging interview with States Newsroom in Minneapolis Wednesday.

Ellison and his colleagues have engaged in more than two dozen lawsuits against Trump administration actions in the first five months of the president’s second term. The AGs have sued over cuts to federal agencies, tariffs, DOGE’s access to government data, attempts to end birthright citizenship, and more. They’ve also toured blue states to tout their accomplishments and listen to voters’ concerns. The stakes are high, Ellison said: the fate of multi-racial democracy.

Ellison, who served for a dozen years in Congress representing Minnesota’s Minneapolis-based 5th District, said the states are a sovereign bulwark against federal power grabs. The Democratic attorneys general are not only fighting a Republican-controlled executive branch, but also a conservative majority on the U.S Supreme Court. In Ellison’s view, recent decisions by the Roberts court — particularly in 303 Creative v. Elenis, in which the court ruled that a business owner could not be obligated to serve a gay couple — signify that the country is moving towards legal segregation. “We are a whisper away from Jim Crow,” Ellison said.

Read more: https://www.yahoo.com/news/minnesota-attorney-general-keith-ellison-010515145.html