More than 40 lawsuits filed in recent days by state attorneys general, unions and nonprofits seek to erect a bulwark in the federal courts against President Trump’s blitzkrieg of executive actions that have upended much of the federal government and challenged the Constitution’s system of checks and balances.
Unlike the opening of Mr. Trump’s first term in 2017, little significant resistance to his second term has arisen in the streets, the halls of Congress or within his own Republican Party. For now at least, lawyers say, the judicial branch may be it.
“The courts really are the front line,” said Skye Perryman, the chief executive of Democracy Forward, which has filed nine lawsuits and won four court orders against the Trump administration.
The multipronged legal pushback has already yielded quick — if potentially fleeting — results. Judicial orders in nine federal court cases will, for a time, partially bind the administration’s hands on its goals. Those include ending automatic citizenship for babies born to undocumented immigrants on U.S. soil; transferring transgender female inmates to male-only prisons; potentially exposing the identities of F.B.I. personnel who investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol; coaxing federal workers to accept “deferred resignation” under a tight deadline; and freezing as much as $3 trillion in domestic spending.
The judiciary’s response to the legal challenges is continuing through the weekend. On Friday afternoon, Judge Carl Nichols, a district judge nominated by Mr. Trump. said he would issue a temporary restraining order halting the administrative leave of 2,200 employees at the U.S. Agency for International Development and the looming withdrawal of nearly all of the agency’s workers from overseas.
Also, late on Friday night, Judge John D. Bates, a nominee of President George W. Bush, rejected a request by a coalition of unions for an emergency order blocking Elon Musk’s team from accessing Labor Department data. While that case is ongoing, Judge Bates’s ruling was the first victory for Mr. Trump’s new administration in federal court. In the early hours of Saturday, U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer, one of President Obama’s nominees, restricted access by Mr. Musk’s government efficiency program to the Treasury Department’s payment and data systems, saying access would risk “irreparable harm.”….
But while the executive branch is entrusted with the capacity for swift, decisive action, the judiciary is slow by design, and the legal opposition to Mr. Trump’s opening moves may struggle to keep up with his fire hose of disruption….
Some legal experts see the executive branch’s deliberate effort to push the boundaries of legality as a bare-knuckle strategy to overwhelm the president’s opposition and eventually win at least some precedent-shattering decisions from the conservative Supreme Court.
“The administration seems to have wanted challenges that consume a ton of resources — of opponents, courts and public attention — even as members of the administration know the provisions do not square with the law that exists,” said Judith Resnik, a professor at Yale Law School.
To Mr. Trump’s backers, the president’s orders are well within the powers outlined in the Constitution’s second section on the executive branch. It is the judicial pushback, they say, that is overstepping the constitutional boundaries laid out in the third section on the judiciary.
“President Trump is not stealing other branches’ powers,” said Mike Davis, who heads the Article III Project, a conservative advocacy group. “He is exercising his Article II powers under the Constitution. And judges who say he can’t? They’re legally wrong. The Supreme Court is going to side with Trump.”…