The Blue State Attorneys General Resisting Trump

With Democrats outnumbered in Congress, a coalition of blue state attorneys general has emerged as the strongest resistance to Donald Trump’s conservative agenda. Together they’ve notched back-to-back victories against Trump’s two attempts to instill a travel ban against several Muslim-majority nations. They now hope to build on that success to form a united front against Trump’s expected efforts to roll back financial and environmental regulation, plus the GOP’s planned repeal of Obamacare.

In February, Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson and Minnesota’s Lori Swanson led the way in derailing Trump’s first immigration order by persuading a panel of federal judges to block it from being enforced. Trump, rather than keep fighting, issued a revised order. That, too, was halted on March 15 when a federal judge in Hawaii ruled in favor of the state’s attorney general, Doug Chin, who’d sued on the grounds that the order was discriminatory. Both suits benefited from an increased level of coordination among Democratic state attorneys general, an effort that began before Trump’s inauguration.