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 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.
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, including 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.
Judges have not minced words. In Seattle last week, a district judge issued the second nationwide injunction blocking Mr. Trump’s order to end universal birthright citizenship. “The Constitution is not something with which the government may play policy games,” Judge John C. Coughenour said. Such a change, he added, could be made only through amending the Constitution. “That’s how the rule of law works.”
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