The Democrats Leading the Opposition Against Trump: Did Letitia James commit mortgage fraud? The courts presumably will decide that question. But conservative news outlets have not waited to celebrate the fact that last week charges were referred to the Justice Department against James, the Democratic attorney general of New York. James has sued President Donald Trump repeatedly, winning a half-billion-dollar judgment against him and his companies last year for business fraud.
"This is a person who prosecuted Trump for everything short of ripping a label off a mattress,” Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, said on Fox News.
James calls the charges against her “baseless.” She also vows to keep up her own legal fights against Trump. Along with other Democratic attorneys general, she has sued his administration repeatedly since he returned to the White House in January. She was among 20 attorneys general to launch a lawsuit to block the dismantling of the federal Department of Education. She and 18 other AGs sued to block Trump’s executive order regarding election rules. A dozen states filed suit on Wednesday to block Trump's tariff powers. And James was part of a coalition of two-dozen AGs that filed suit against health-care funding cuts.
James and other Democratic attorneys general have emerged as Trump’s leading antagonists, with lawsuits that have been essentially relentless. Democratic AGs launched three separate lawsuits against the administration during a single 24-hour period earlier this month. “Ever since Project 2025 dropped, they began planning for this,” says Carolyn Fiddler, communications director for the Democratic Attorneys General Association, referring to the Heritage Foundation document that has provided a policy blueprint for the administration.
Their strategy is not unique at this point. It once was rare for state attorneys general to band together to sue the federal government. That began to change during the Obama presidency, when Republican AGs sued repeatedly to block federal health and environmental policies. Democratic AGs were even more active during the first Trump presidency, filing lawsuits by the dozen, followed by Republicans taking their turn suing the Biden administration.
During his first term, Democratic attorneys general sued Trump 138 times — double the number of state-generated lawsuits filed under Barack Obama or George W. Bush. There’s nothing to say they can’t break that record during his current term.
Unlike the Democratic minority in Congress, attorneys general maintain real power, able to turn to the courts as a check against the administration. There have been efforts in some states to curb their powers, but that’s not going to happen in the blue states that Democratic AGs mostly hail from. Often their actions are successful; several courts have blocked Trump spending cuts, at least temporarily.
Attorney general offices vary in size and the number of lawyers who work in-house. Collectively, there are plenty of lawyers around to take action. “They’ve been energized all the way through,” Fiddler says. “They talk amongst themselves all the time, like literally almost every day.”
(Emily Topping/TNS)
The Strongest Governors Can Overplay Their Hands: After taking office last year, Republican Jeff Landry of Louisiana quickly emerged as one of the most ambitious governors in the country. He was able to get his way on a wide variety of legislation in areas such as the death penalty, education and executive power.
There were reasons to predict it would be easy for him. Landry, who succeeded a Democrat, John Bel Edwards, has GOP supermajorities to work with in the Legislature. But suddenly, in his second year, Landry’s hand is not looking quite as formidable.
Last month, Landry pushed hard for four constitutional amendments, including a major tax and budget overhaul. All of them were not only defeated but rejected by roughly two-thirds of voters. “It was a major miscalculation on his part,” says Robert Mann, a Louisiana State University political scientist. “If there was any sense that he was invincible — and he’s tried to project that from the very beginning — if the amendments didn’t puncture that, they dinged it pretty seriously.”
With Louisiana’s legislative session just getting underway, Landry is trying to split the difference on this year’s top issue — trying to address the state’s high insurance premiums. A lot of states are wrestling with this question, but insurance is especially costly in Louisiana due to a combination of hurricanes and laws that are fairly favorable to plaintiffs. Landry collected a considerable amount of campaign money from trial lawyers during the 2023 election season; last year, he vetoed a tort reform bill that the lawyers opposed. The governor and Insurance Commissioner Tim Temple, also a Republican, are openly spatting about the right approach to take from here.
Landry has angered some conservatives by backing a Democratic bill addressing auto insurance, and some on the right still harbor resentment that he went along with a congressional redistricting plan that added a second Black-majority (a.k.a., Democratic) seat to the Louisiana congressional delegation. The U.S. Supreme Court may toss that map, but it helped Democrats gain a House seat last year.
In terms of his other priorities, Landry faces a state Senate that, while largely supportive of his agenda last year, refused to give him everything he wanted in terms of overhauling the state’s election process or calling a constitutional convention. “He’s had to contend with a Senate that’s helpful but has never been willing to give him a blank check,” Mann says. “He wants another $50 million for school choice but from the get-go the Senate president [Cameron Henry] said, ‘We’re not going to do that.’”
Even though Landry has suffered a number of setbacks, he’s far from being a lame duck. Louisiana’s governors are institutionally strong and Landry remains a popular figure in the heavily Republican state. He’s still likely to hold sway on a number of issues, just not every issue. “He is weaker, but it’s all relative,” says Jeffrey Sadow, a political scientist at LSU Shreveport. “He was off to such a strong start that any setback at all would detract from that.”
