{"id":7142,"date":"2017-07-17T12:18:27","date_gmt":"2017-07-17T12:18:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dominiclevent.com\/blog\/?p=7142"},"modified":"2019-04-17T17:17:12","modified_gmt":"2019-04-17T17:17:12","slug":"the-litigation-storm-around-president-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dominiclevent.com\/blog\/the-litigation-storm-around-president-trump\/","title":{"rendered":"The Litigation Storm Around President Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Liberal activists are thrilled to be suing President Donald Trump. \u201cThe reason you\u2019re seeing a proliferation of lawsuits against President Trump is that he brought his lifelong contempt for the rule of law with him to the Oval Office,\u201d says Norman Eisen, the chief White House ethics lawyer for President Barack Obama.<\/p>\n

Eisen now heads a watchdog group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which\u2014along with Democratic members of Congress, the state of Maryland, and the District of Columbia\u2014are suing<\/a> Trump for violating the Constitution\u2019s foreign emoluments clause. That long-dormant anti-corruption provision forbids public officials from accepting payments from foreign governments. The suits accuse Trump of profiting from private businesses such as his Washington hotel, which has been patronized by officials from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other countries.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith unusual speed, Trump has created a shooting gallery of litigation targets,\u201d says Joshua Matz, a Washington constitutional lawyer who works closely with attorneys bringing the\u00a0emoluments cases. Another big-ticket legal action<\/a>\u00a0for months has stymied\u00a0the president\u2019s executive order imposing a temporary ban\u00a0on immigrants from six predominantly Muslim countries. (The Supreme Court on Monday said it would hear arguments in October as to\u00a0whether the ban is lawful; in the interim, the justices largely allowed the restriction to go into effect.)<\/p>\n

Yet another legal challenge has blocked<\/a> a separate executive order cutting off certain federal funds from \u201csanctuary cities,\u201d which refuse to have their police departments help federal authorities target immigrants for deportation. \u201cThis administration is overreaching,\u201d says Patti Goldman, an attorney in Seattle with the group Earthjustice, which is spearheading a suit challenging a Trump order<\/a> that directs federal agencies to kill two regulations for any new one they issue.<\/p>\n

Conservatives bemoan the situation. \u201cThis is lawfare\u2014using litigation as a tool of political warfare,\u201d says David Rivkin, an attorney who served in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. \u201cIt depresses me.\u201d The White House did not respond to requests for comment.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A look at Pacer<\/a>, the official database of federal cases, shows\u00a0more suits filed against the president during the first five months of the Trump administration than during comparable periods of the Obama and George W. Bush administrations. But the raw numbers aren\u2019t terribly meaningful. The vast majority of cases filed against any president are frivolous, filed by prison inmates, quickly dismissed, or all of the above. Once peripheral cases are combed out, 29 suits remain against Trump, and many of those are redundant. Multiple travel-ban\u00a0challenges are pending in the lower courts, for example, even as two of the cases await review by the Supreme Court. The Trump administration has asked the justices to reinstate the restrictions, arguing that the president has extremely\u00a0broad authority over all immigration matters.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a fair bit of litigation against any president,\u201d says Deepak Gupta, a Washington lawyer involved in the emoluments cases. \u201cWhat\u2019s different about Trump is the profoundly important legal questions this administration has raised so early in its tenure by means of executive orders.\u201d<\/p>\n

Obama eventually faced Republican-backed lawsuits targeting his health-reform initiative, his program to shield millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation, and his plan to limit carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants. In the wake of 9\/11, Bush grappled with a wave of litigation challenging his policies on detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects. But neither Obama nor Bush had to deal with those consequential cases in their first five months. According to Pacer, Obama faced five non-frivolous suits during that early period; Bush, only one. And none of those cases raised fundamental issues about the presidency.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A 2007 Supreme Court case in which a dozen states successfully sued<\/a> the Bush administration’s\u00a0Environmental Protection Agency\u00a0to force it to regulate greenhouse gas emissions\u00a0\u201creally opened the door for states and municipalities to sue an administration,\u201d says Raymond Brescia, an associate professor at Albany Law School.\u00a0Republican state attorneys general regularly sued the Obama administration. While a legal challenge against Obamacare wasn’t successful, Obama’s Clean Power Plan and immigration-reform program were thwarted by Republican state attacks.\u00a0Rivkin, the conservative attorney, served as an outside counsel to both the anti-Obamacare and anti-Clean Power Plan efforts. \u201cThere is a venerable tradition of states suing the federal government,\u201d he says. He calls the cases against Trump \u201cmore personal.\u201d<\/p>\n