Scoop: Dems prep for Trump legal meltdown
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Top Democrats on the Hill suspect President Trump will ignore one of the many major court rulings that'll be coming his way and are gaming out legal and political responses behind the scenes.
Why it matters: Federal judges are the main obstacle to Trump's efforts to remake the federal government. Trump has said he'll obey court rulings. But he and Elon Musk have questioned whether the judicial branch should be able to stop the executive.
Democrats are meeting with state attorneys general, top lawyers, litigation firms, constitutional experts and advocacy organizations, multiple top lawmakers told Axios.
- "Looking into all the implications and all the strategies … is officially a big part of what we're doing," said Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.).
- Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), a co-chair of the litigation task force leading the effort, confirmed to Axios: "We are certainly having that conversation."
Zoom in: Rep. Max Frost (D-Fla.), a member of Democratic leadership, told Axios that Trump "obviously hasn't learned his lesson from Jan. 6. They don't see that anything went wrong ... and that scares me."
- Trump "has his own personal militia that he essentially gave permission to do exactly what they did … on January 6," said Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.).
- "So yeah, I do worry about that. How could you not, given what we've been through," she said.
State of play: Ousted officials, Democratic state attorneys general, and other plaintiffs have moved quickly to sue the Trump administration to block efforts to push out thousands of federal workers and shut down agencies.
- Attempts to end birthright citizenship, offer "buyouts" to federal employees, give DOGE access to sensitive systems and shut the U.S. Agency for International Development have all been blocked by federal judges.
- House Democratic caucus Chair Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) told Axios: "Nobody is above the law, no matter how many times Donald Trump thinks he is. We'll let this process go through the courts, and we'll be prepared to talk about it and react."
The other side: Trump told reporters last week that he'll always abide by the courts, always abide by them. And we'll appeal."
- But he and his GOP allies have assailed the federal judiciary, with Trump saying last week that "maybe we have to look at the judges." At least two House Republicans are planning efforts to impeach specific judges.
Harrison Fields, White House principal deputy press secretary, told Axios, referring to past criminal cases against Trump: "It's extremely rich of Democrats to now be concerned about a constitutional crisis, when they advocated for and participated in the greatest constitutional crisis in American history."
- "The real crisis Democrats are facing," Fields added, "is their inability to accept defeat, but elections have consequences and the American people decisively rejected their tried-and-failed resistance playbook at the ballot box."
Reality check: Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) — another task force co-chair, and a former Jan. 6 committee member — cautioned against "leaping to catastrophic thinking."
- "There are a lot of intermediate steps that can be taken by courts to force compliance with their lawful orders," Raskin said.
- Those include courts placing liens on bank accounts and possessing personal property.
The bottom line: "We've been winning in all venues ... even with Trump-appointed judges," Huffman said of the DOGE-related court cases.
- "The real question now is: How much will this administration comply with court orders."
