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Friday, February 7
We're tracking 24 lawsuits holding Trump accountable — with new developments happening quickly. Upgrade to our premium membership for $120/year or $10/month ([link removed]) to get crucial updates and analysis sent straight to your inbox.

** ON THE DOCKET THIS WEEK
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** * Lawsuits over Trump admin’s extralegal actions abound
* Georgia secretary of state asks Trump admin to facilitate voter suppression efforts
* Republicans once again raise fringe election legal theory in SCOTUS

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** TRUMP ACCOUNTABILITY
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** Lawsuits over Trump admin’s extralegal actions abound
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Since President Donald Trump returned to office less than three weeks ago, pro-democracy organizations, unions, individuals and Democratic states have mounted at least 24 different legal challenges to his administration’s flurry of brazenly unlawful executive actions, according to Democracy Docket’s tracking.

Over the past four days alone, the pro-democracy coalition brought seven new cases to hold the Trump administration accountable. This week’s legal accountability efforts began Monday when advocacy groups and unions sued ([link removed]) the U.S. Department of the Treasury for sharing confidential financial and personal data with the Elon Musk-run Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

And in the following days, anonymous current and former FBI agents — along with the Federal Bureau of Investigation Agents Association — filed a duo ([link removed]) of lawsuits ([link removed]) seeking to stop Trump’s Justice Department from effectuating a directive to expose and purge bureau personnel involved in the Jan. 6 and classified documents criminal investigations into Trump.

Among the many other newly filed actions this week, one from Democracy Forward challenges ([link removed]) an Office of Personnel Management email supposedly offering career federal employees the chance to resign from their jobs in return for paid leave until Sept. 30, 2025. Still another ([link removed]) contests Trump’s unlawful removal of Gwynne A. Wilcox from her position as a duly confirmed member of the National Labor Relations Board.

It is easy to get overwhelmed by the administration’s deluge of illegal and anti-democratic activity — all of which is wreaking veritable havoc on individual lives and severely undermining the integrity of democratic institutions. But the good news is that courts have already stepped in to immediately halt some of Trump’s most egregious executive orders and will continue to do so.

Indeed, Trump has not prevailed even once in court over the last 18 days since he took office.

As of last week, two separate judges in Rhode Island ([link removed]) and Washington D.C. ([link removed]) issued temporary restraining orders blocking administration guidance that effectively instituted a government-wide freeze on all federal agency grants and loans. The judges said the freeze — which caused entities like emergency shelters and healthcare providers to be shut out of funding portals or denied mission critical resources — likely violates federal law and the U.S. Constitution.

On Wednesday and Thursday, federal judges in Maryland ([link removed]) and Washington State ([link removed]) issued nationwide preliminary injunctions blocking Trump’s executive order purporting to severely restrict birthright citizenship. The courts sided with immigration advocacy groups, affected individuals and Democratic attorneys general who alleged the order likely runs afoul of the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause. At a hearing, the judge in Washington — an 84-year-old Reagan appointee — said “the rule of law is a bright beacon which I intend to follow… I refuse to let that beacon go dark today.”

Courts handed down even more rulings against the administration Thursday, including in the aforementioned DOGE ([link removed]) and deferred resignation ([link removed]) cases as well as in other ([link removed]) ongoing lawsuits. Read more about this week’s Trump accountability efforts here ([link removed]) . ([link removed])


** GEORGIA
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** Georgia secretary of state asks Trump admin to facilitate voter suppression efforts
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Shortly after the new U.S. Attorney General and Trump loyalist Pam Bondi was sworn in ([link removed]) Wednesday, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) asked her to drop the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) lawsuit ([link removed]) challenging the state’s 2021 voter suppression law, Senate Bill 202.

The move demonstrates how GOP politicians — even at the state and local level — are exploiting the new administration’s willingness to make voting harder, especially for marginalized individuals.

Raffensperger specifically accused the Biden DOJ of being politically motivated when it pursued the case and asked Bondi to “take a renewed look at Georgia's voting laws without the partisan approach that affected the last administration.”

S.B. 202 — parts of which have been blocked by a federal court — imposes numerous restrictions on mail-in voting, shortens the timeline of runoff elections, curtails the early voting period and bans individuals from giving out food or drinks to voters waiting in line within a certain radius of a polling place. Biden’s DOJ alleged the law contravenes Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by specifically targeting Black Georgians.

In a separate request Monday, Raffensperger asked newly minted Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem for greater access to immigration data compiled in the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program to verify voter registrations — a long-time GOP goal that exists as part of its broader crusade ([link removed]) against alleged noncitizen voting.

Republicans argue that gaining more access to federal immigration databases is necessary for citizenship verification when processing voter registration applications. In 2024, Florida ([link removed]) , Iowa ([link removed]) , Ohio ([link removed]) and Texas ([link removed]) sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), alleging that state officials need access to a “unique immigration identifier” to pinpoint noncitizens. The states’ lawsuits seek access to other immigration and citizenship databases, and also ask DHS to provide citizenship status information for specific voters. Read more about Raffensperger’s latest voter suppression tactics here
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** U.S. SUPREME COURT
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** Republicans once again raise fringe election legal theory in SCOTUS
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In a recent cert petition ([link removed]) filed in the U.S. Supreme Court, the Republican National Committee (RNC) and Pennsylvania GOP raised the so-called independent state legislature (ISL) theory ([link removed]) — a specious legal argument positing that the U.S. Constitution’s Elections and Electors Clauses grant state legislatures exclusive authority to regulate federal elections without court intervention.

The high court previously rejected the far-fetched constitutional argument in its 2022 Moore v. Harper ([link removed]) decision — and just last month, the justices denied ([link removed]) an ISL-based appeal out of Montana.

Undeterred by the Court’s previous rebuffs, Republicans are once again asking the justices to weigh in on the ISL theory, this time in an appeal of an election case ([link removed]) out of Pennsylvania. In particular, the RNC is seeking Supreme Court review of an October 2024 Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision ([link removed]) allowing voters to cast provisional ballots on Election Day if their timely received mail-in ballots are disqualified due to a technical mistake.

According to the GOP petitioners, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court “transgressed” the ordinary bounds of judicial review and thereby “usurped” the authority of the Pennsylvania Legislature when it concluded that voters have the right to cast provisional ballots as a failsafe to avoid disenfranchisement.

Citing Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s concurrence in Moore — which suggested the Court should revisit the limits of state court review in a future case — the RNC urged the justices to take up the Pennsylvania appeal and adopt an ISL-rooted “test” to determine if a state court went beyond the ordinary bounds of judicial review. The Supreme Court notably declined to outline such a test in Moore, as it acknowledged that the “questions presented in [that] area are complex and context specific.”

On the eve of the November 2024 election, the Court unanimously rejected ([link removed]) Republicans’ request for a stay of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s ruling — thereby ensuring that voters in the swing state could still rely on provisional voting as needed.

Now, in an off-cycle year, it remains to be seen whether the Court’s conservative justices will have an appetite to take up the case in full and entertain the GOP’s revived ISL theory arguments. Read more about the RNC’s cert petition here ([link removed]) . ([link removed])


** OPINION
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** The Coming Attack on Free and Fair Elections
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Like most aspiring autocrats, Trump fears democratic institutions because they threaten to place restraints on him. And for Trump and his MAGA movement, nothing is more concerning than the enterprise of free and fair elections. It should come as no surprise that in recent public remarks, he listed requiring ([link removed]) voter ID as his condition for California to receive federal aid following the devastating fires in Los Angeles. As Marc explains in his latest piece: “Attacking our elections is Trump’s top priority.”

“If we are to preserve democracy, those of us on the left must prioritize free and fair elections. We need to accept that the rules of voting are often skewed against minority and young voters. Most importantly, we must understand that voter suppression and election subversion can affect, and sometimes dictate, the outcome of elections,” Marc writes. Read more here ([link removed]) . ([link removed])


** NEW EPISODE
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** Trump is Making Us Less “Safe” | Rep. Eric Swalwell
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California Congressman Eric Swalwell joins the podcast to discuss the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, how Trump’s actions are harming our democracy and security and Democrats’ plan to fight back. Watch on YouTube here ([link removed]) .


** What We’re Doing
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We’re reading a recent New York Times op-ed ([link removed]) by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder entitled: “The Courts Must Stop This Judge From Stealing an Election.” Holder is referring to Judge Jefferson Griffin — a GOP North Carolina Supreme Court Candidate, who is relentlessly seeking to overturn his 2024 election loss to incumbent Democratic Justice Allison Riggs via legal challenges ([link removed]) .

In the op-ed, Holder decries Griffin’s efforts to throw out over 60,000 lawfully cast votes and sow doubt in the integrity of our elections. “Four years after America survived a brazen attempt to overturn an election, we must again stand firm, protect every ballot and demand that the will of the people prevails,” Holder writes.
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