Donald Trump agenda set to collide with US legal system

Zoe Tillman, Tribune News Service

President-elect Donald Trump will go up against a familiar adversary as he prepares to fulfill campaign promises of a swift rollback of Biden-era policies and an aggressive execution of his own agenda: The grind of the US legal system. The stubborn realities of litigation stymied Trump’s ability to carry out quick changes during his first term, as fights over his executive orders, policies-via-tweet and controversial personnel moves spent months or even years winding through the courts. The dynamic worked in his favor out of office. He ran out the clock on at least some of the criminal cases against him through appeals and delays.

Democratic state officials and left-leaning groups are vowing to bring a wall of legal challenges. Trump’s pledges of mass deportations, broad tariffs, federal agency overhauls and other sweeping changes are all expected to land before judges. Trump’s attorney general — his latest pick is longtime ally Pam Bondi — also will have to navigate whether and how to unwind inherited cases while defending fresh executive branch action. Pending court fights against the Biden administration span from environmental protections and prescription drug pricing to abortion access and workplace safety. Trump’s allies in the Republican Party and the conservative legal movement are cautiously optimistic about being better prepared to fend off court challenges this time. But his opponents say they learned lessons from his first term, too.

New Jersey’s Democratic Attorney General Matthew Platkin said in an interview that he and his counterparts had already spent months working on legal strategies. “When the first Trump administration refused to defend laws or policies that benefited millions of people across the country, we were not afraid to step in,” Platkin said. “I don’t wake up every morning dying to sue the federal government. We’re going to do it when we think it’s in the clear interests of the residents of our state.”

First-term lessons: The “political incentives” are high for Trump’s opponents to pull his administration into court as much as possible, even in long-shot cases, Eric Olson, the former top appellate lawyer for Colorado, said at a recent event. “Restraint will not carry the day,” said Olson, who was involved in fights during Trump’s first term, including against the administration’s efforts to build a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump faced a barrage of lawsuits that slowed down his ability to turn campaign promises into reality the last time he was in the White House, even if those challenges ultimately fell short.

Federal judges across the country blocked his efforts to restrict travel to the US from several majority-Muslim countries. Nearly a year after he signed the first version of the travel ban executive order, the US Supreme Court allowed a third iteration to fully take effect, and then formally upheld the policy the following summer. Trump’s failed attempt at ending Obama-era legal protections for the children of undocumented immigrants offered a cautionary tale in how courts can stand in the way of undoing his predecessor’s policies. Judges repeatedly halted Trump’s move to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. When the Supreme Court ruled against him in 2020, the majority focused on deficiencies in how the administration had gone about rolling back the program, as opposed to its authority to do so.

Biden challenges: Biden administration policies are tied up in litigation at every level of US courts, and there’s uncertainty about how much, and how quickly, Trump will move to undo federal rules or change the government’s positions in court. The fate of cases before the Supreme Court have gotten the most attention, but there’s a wide universe of pending lower court action. There are multiple lawsuits challenging a key part of the Inflation Reduction Act — one of Biden’s signature legislative achievements — that empowers the Medicare program to negotiate the cost of certain drugs with manufacturers. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently revived one of the challenges after a district judge dismissed it.