Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. After the barrage of executive actions that kicked off Donald Trump’s second term, the legal resistance is taking shape. Lawsuits are being filed and trial courts are weighing in, with judges already dealing the administration a series of losses. But it’s early yet in a process that will likely land at the Supreme Court on several fronts.
“Disingenuous” is how one judge described Trump’s attempt to avoid legal scrutiny of his federal spending freeze. Halting the effort Monday, U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan wrote that instead of taking “a measured approach to identify purportedly wasteful spending,” the government “cut the fuel supply to a vast, complicated, nationwide machine — seemingly without any consideration for the consequences of that decision.” The Biden appointee’s temporary restraining order in the District of Columbia followed a Rhode Island judge’s order likewise blocking Trump’s bid to “pause” trillions of dollars of congressionally approved funds.
“Untenable” is how another judge described Trump’s argument against birthright citizenship. Reminding the government that it’s an “unequivocal Constitutional right,” U.S. District Judge John Coughenour in Seattle granted a preliminary injunction against the president’s executive order seeking to upend that right. The Reagan appointee’s rebuke echoed a Biden appointee’s ruling affirming the long-standing right, with the latter judge in Maryland writing that Trump’s order “interprets the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in a manner that the Supreme Court has resoundingly rejected and no court in the country has ever endorsed.”
We’ll see what today’s Supreme Court says about that issue and others poised to reach the justices.
Another brewing Supreme Court test stems from the president removing a National Labor Relations Board member whose congressionally approved term isn’t up until 2028. Trump’s action against Gwynne Wilcox violates a federal law that says presidents can only remove members for cause and with notice and a hearing, none of which Wilcox received, she said in her complaint filed this week. The firing likewise contradicts a 1935 Supreme Court case called Humphrey’s Executor. That precedent was called out for targeting by Project 2025, the conservative blueprint that Trump tried to distance himself from during his campaign but has embraced in office.
And that’s just some of the latest legal action prompted by the first days of Trump’s second term. Another development was lawsuits from FBI agents who worked on Jan. 6 cases, who said they feared retaliation from the government they served. In response to the litigation, the Trump administration agreed not to release their names, providing some comfort to agents concerned for their safety because of the actions of the president and his supporters.
Meanwhile, Pam Bondi was confirmed as Trump’s attorney general 54-46. The president’s impeachment lawyer from his first term began by telling Justice Department staff that, contrary to tradition, DOJ lawyers are “his” (i.e. Trump’s) lawyers. As The Washington Post explained, Bondi “spent her first day on the job Wednesday redirecting the [DOJ’s] significant law enforcement authority toward addressing [Trump’s] grievances with the agency.” Elsewhere in Trump’s DOJ, his interim U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia has made his allegiance clear to Trump and his ally Elon Musk, whose actions with his Department of Government Efficiency team have sparked its own emerging legal docket. That temporary top prosecutor, former Jan. 6 defense lawyer Ed Martin, has been penning dramatic, supportive letters to Musk directly — and, for unexplained reasons, exclusively — on the billionaire’s social media platform. While Martin hasn’t specified who he’s going after on Musk and DOGE’s behalf or in violation of which laws, his public statements do well to capture the new administration’s approach to “law and order.” And speaking of who gets government protection these days, Trump’s DOJ just told the Supreme Court that it no longer thinks Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors violates the Constitution. Whether it does is at issue in the pending case of United States v. Skrmetti — “United States” leading that case caption because the government during the Biden administration had appealed the issue to the justices. The case was argued last year and is awaiting a decision from the court (likely to come by July). The DOJ didn’t ask the justices to dismiss the appeal, but it wanted the court to know that “the government’s previously stated views no longer represent the United States’ position.” As the brief rundown in this week’s newsletter shows, that understated line is true of much government activity these days. Have any questions or comments for me? I’d love to hear from you! Please email deadlinelegal@nbcuni.com for a chance to be featured in a future newsletter.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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