Across the country, state attorneys general are taking on the Trump administration by challenging the president’s attempts to expand his executive power in court.
In a new episode of “Can They Do That?” MSNBC Legal Correspondent Lisa Rubin sat down with three Democratic AG’s who are leading the legal pushback to Donald Trump: Kwame Raoul of Illinois, Matthew Platkin of New Jersey and Keith Ellison of Minnesota.
Rubin began the episode by noting that for many decades, states’ rights were the “rallying cry of the political right and the conservative legal movement.” She asked the AG’s to explain why Americans of “all political stripes” should care about state sovereignty, which, Rubin argued, “is a concept that many people, particularly on the left, haven’t thought a lot about in the space of thinking about threats to democracy.”
“I think it’s fair to say that today, your rights and privileges as an American citizen vary based on what state you live in,” Platkin said. “If you want to be free from gun violence, if you want to make sure you have access to reproductive health care, if you want your kids to get a quality public education — all of those are meaningfully different depending on whether you live in a state, frankly, with attorneys general like us or not.”
Rubin asked which Trump policy the attorneys general believe poses the greatest threat to the rule of law and state sovereignty. “The usurpation of the National Guard in California, to me, is the big, ugly threat to American democracy,” Ellison said.
Raoul agreed with Ellison, noting that although Trump may be focused on California now, any state could be next: “Illinois, we anticipate, will be targeted.”
The Illinois attorney general told Rubin he expected that the administration might attempt to use the same tactics in Chicago as it did in Los Angeles, an idea he called “outrageous,” considering that he thinks Chicago proved it could control large crowds without assistance from the federal government during last summer’s Democratic National Convention.
When Rubin asked Platkin if the president’s actions had dragged the U.S. into a constitutional crisis, the New Jersey attorney general said it would “be impossible” to say no. “Given that we’ve had the president, the vice president, the attorney general and their representatives in court openly either defying or threatening to defy court orders, I think we are,” he explained. Ellison stressed that while he and his fellow attorneys general would continue to take on Trump in court, it was also important for everyday Americans to join in the fight. “The American people are coming out more and more every day, more people who’ve never been to a protest march in their lives,” Ellison said. “So I think, yes, we’re going to keep on suing, but I also think it’s important for us to continue to communicate with the public and give people hope that we can protect and defend and extend our democracy. And because it really is, at the end of the day, it’s about people power.” Watch Rubin’s full conversation with Raoul, Platkin and Ellison in the video below.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
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