An apparently Web-only article by Charlie Savage, Reid J. Epstein, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan in the NYT yesterday reports “The Resistance to a New Trump Administration Has Already Started.” While the headline and, perhaps especially, the subhed (“An emerging coalition that views Donald J. Trump’s agenda as a threat to democracy is laying the groundwork to push back if he wins in November, taking extraordinary pre-emptive actions“) had me thinking there was a movement to keep him out of power if he were indeed to win, what’s happening is much more subtle.
Opponents of Donald J. Trump are drafting potential lawsuits in case he is elected in November and carries out mass deportations, as he has vowed. One group has hired a new auditor to withstand any attempt by a second Trump administration to unleash the Internal Revenue Service against them. Democratic-run state governments are even stockpiling abortion medication.
A sprawling network of Democratic officials, progressive activists, watchdog groups and ex-Republicans has been taking extraordinary steps to prepare for a potential second Trump presidency, drawn together by the fear that Mr. Trump’s return to power would pose a grave threat not just to their agenda but to American democracy itself.
“Trump has made clear that he’ll disregard the law and test the limits of our system,” said Joanna Lydgate, the chief executive of States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan democracy watchdog organization that works with state officials in both parties. “What we’re staring down is extremely dark.”
So far, nothing particularly unusual. Activist groups prepare for potential legal action as a matter of course. Although I do find the concept of doing so because the opponent disregards the rule of law rather amusing; court orders are only useful if obeyed.
While the Supreme Court on Thursday rejected an attempt to nullify federal approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, liberals fear a new Trump administration could rescind the approval or use a 19th-century morality law to criminalize sending it across state lines.
More novel is this:
The Democratic governor of Washington State, Jay Inslee, said he had secured a large enough supply of mifepristone pills to preserve access for women in his state through a second Trump administration. The supply is locked away at a state warehouse.
“We have it physically in the state of Washington, which could stop him and his anti-choice forces from prohibiting its distribution,” Mr. Inslee said in an interview. “It has a life span of five or six years. If there was another Trump administration, it’ll get us through.”
States defied federal marijuana laws without consequence for many years, so this isn’t unique. Still, an extraordinary precaution to take “just in case.” Especially when the candidate hasn’t even taken a public position on the issue.
There is always discussion in any election year of what might happen if the other side wins the White House. Such talk has been typically limited to Washington chatter and private speculation, as much of the energy has focused on helping one’s party win the election and develop wish-list policy plans.
But the early timing, volume and scale of the planning underway to push back against a potential second Trump administration are without precedent. The loose-knit coalition is determined not to be caught flat-footed, as many were after his unexpected victory in 2016.
This is a natural consequence of our politics being both polarized and powerful. Decades ago, when we had two catch-all parties, the consequences of losing an election were much less stark. Now, both sides see it as an existential crisis.*
If Mr. Trump returns to power, he is openly planning to impose radical changes — many with authoritarian overtones. Those plans include using the Justice Department to take revenge on his adversaries, sending federal troops into Democratic cities, carrying out mass deportations, building huge camps to hold immigrant detainees, making it easier to fire civil servants and replace them with loyalists and expanding and centralizing executive power.
This is a weird list. A radically more draconian immigration policy is a bad idea but it’s in a whole different category from weaponizing the state against one’s domestic enemies. Treating them as comingled is among the reasons Trump might actually win re-election.
The leaders of many of the centrist and left-leaning groups involved insist their energies are primarily devoted to preventing Mr. Trump from regaining power in the first place. Many are also wary about discussing their contingency plans publicly, for fear of signaling a lack of confidence in President Biden’s campaign prospects. Their angst is intensified by Mr. Biden’s low approval numbers and by his persistent trailing of Mr. Trump in polls of the states that are likely to decide the election.
Interviews with more than 30 officials and leaders of organizations about their plans revealed a combination of acute exhaustion and acute anxiety. Activist groups that spent the four years of Mr. Trump’s presidency organizing mass protests and pursuing legal challenges, ultimately helping channel that energy into persuading voters to oust him from power in 2020, are now realizing with great dread they may have to resist him all over again.
The irony here is that “the Resistance” helped fuel the extremism. While talk of a “Deep State” and the like was vastly overblown, Trump and company were rightly frustrated that employees of the Executive branch were openly defying Executive Orders and otherwise working against policies the duly elected** President was trying to put into place. Ditto the fact that his efforts to overturn policies his predecessor put into place by executive fiat being overturned in court because of his own administration’s incompetence in following the Administrative Procedures Act; from the standpoint of his supporters, the system was rigged against him.
The group leaders say they learned a lot from 2017 to 2021 about how to run an effective resistance campaign. At the same time, their understanding of what Mr. Trump is capable of expanded after the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. They believe that the orbit around Mr. Trump has grown more sophisticated and that a second Trump White House would be both more radical and more effective, especially on core issues like immigration.
“What Trump and his acolytes are running on is an authoritarian playbook,” said Patrick Gaspard, the chief executive of the CAP Action Fund, the political arm of the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress. He added, “So now we have to democracy-proof our actual institutions and the values that we share.”
I honestly don’t know what that means. Trump’s proposals have definitely gotten more radical. I’m skeptical that his team is more competent; he’s driven out anyone with real policy chops.
Regardless, what does it mean to “democracy-proof” institutions? Apparently, making it hard for Trump to govern:
The Biden administration pushed through a flurry of regulations in the spring, meeting a deadline to ensure that those rules could not be summarily overturned next year under a 1996 law if Mr. Trump wins the election and Republicans take total control of Congress. But administration officials have generally been reluctant to engage in contingency planning, insisting they are confident Mr. Biden will win a second term.
Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman, denounced these efforts as a way to pre-empt Mr. Trump from being able to implement a legitimate policy agenda.
“It’s not surprising Biden and his cronies are working overtime to stymie the will of the American people after they vote to elect President Trump and his America First agenda,” Mr. Cheung said. “Their devious actions are a direct threat to democracy.”
The machinations here are technical but I’m actually inclined to agree with Cheung. Executive orders should be able to be overturned by the next Chief Executive.
Earlier this week, representatives from 50 national and local immigration rights organizations convened at a hotel outside Phoenix for a three-day retreat under the umbrella group Immigrant Movement Visioning Process. On the agenda for two days was “Scenario Planning: Post Election Readiness,” building on a four-hour exercise the group had conducted online in May, according to Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center.
And next month, the anti-Trump conservative group Principles First and Norman Eisen, who was a lawyer for House Democrats during Mr. Trump’s first impeachment and helped produce an “autocracy threat tracker” focused on Mr. Trump’s plans, are organizing a conference at New York University entitled “Autocracy in America – A Warning and Response.” They are inviting dozens of practitioners and scholars to discuss how to resist leaders with authoritarian leanings around the world, Mr. Eisen said.
Maurice Mitchell, the head of the Working Families Party and a co-anchor of Fight Back Table, a progressive coalition that formed in 2017, said activists opposed to Mr. Trump’s agenda were primarily trying to prevent him from winning. But he said they were also determined to be prepared if he does retake power and to stay out of each other’s lanes.
None of that strikes me as problematic. It’s the nature of activist groups to engage in activism.
A common tactic to push back against the first Trump administration was through litigation that tied up his policies in court. Sometimes that work succeeded in blocking actions entirely, and in other cases it delayed those policies from taking effect.
The American Civil Liberties Union, one of the chief litigants against the first Trump administration, is planning to assume a similar role if he regains the White House. In anticipation of that role, the A.C.L.U. has hired a new auditing firm to do a top-to-bottom scrub of the organization’s finances to ensure it can withstand scrutiny if a Trump administration were to sic the I.R.S. on it.
Groups on both sides of the aisle have been doing this sort of thing for decades. It’s expensive and frustrating, transferring power to judges and away from the people’s elected representatives. But it’s also the nature of our system.
Ditto this:
Lawyers working for Democratic state attorneys general have been quietly studying the playbooks of their Republican counterparts in Texas and Florida, whom they view as being most successful at attacking and obstructing the Biden administration.
A person with knowledge of these conversations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said one of their goals was to see what aspects of the red-state anti-Biden playbook could be appropriated to ensure that Democrats can play offense as well as defense against a potential Trump administration.
The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade also forced a sense of urgency upon liberal groups and governors. Immediately after the decision, Democratic governors and state attorneys general began arranging calls and meetings to figure out how to counter the new threat to abortion access in their states.
California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, founded a group called the Reproductive Freedom Alliance as a hub for governors to coordinate their strategies. Though nonpartisan, it now comprises 23 governors, all Democrats.
The governors in the alliance have worked together to plan litigation, pass shield laws to protect abortion providers and patients from penalties in other states and secure the emergency stockpiles of abortion pills in case they become unavailable or severely restricted. It could be the seeds of a broader collaboration to resist Mr. Trump’s agenda.
“The Reproductive Freedom Alliance has pioneered a model of coordination across states to defend, and expand, access to reproductive health care — enabling governors and key staff to develop relationships and a structure for collaboration that could be replicated on other issues, like immigration and gun safety,” said Julia Spiegel, a lawyer who helped start the Reproductive Freedom Alliance from Mr. Newsom’s office.
This is ultimately federalism at work.
There are more examples in the piece but it’s all of the same piece.
*Yes, Trump and many of his co-partisans have signaled a true disregard for the rule of law and the outcome of elections in a way that has only been true on the relevant fringes of the other party. But their voters don’t see it that way.
**Yes, he lost the popular vote by a substantial margin. He nonetheless won the election under the rules that have been in place for a very long time.
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Author: James Joyner
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