The Nation - No attorney general in the country is battling President Donald Trump more proficiently—and drawing more of his fire—than [Letitia] James. When Trump was out of office, she brought the successful civil case charging him and his company with business fraud for alternately inflating and deflating the value of his assets in order to reduce property taxes and obtain favorable rates from banks and insurance companies. The case resulted in a $454 million fine, which Trump is appealing.
Since Trump’s reelection, James has d as a North Star in the chaos, inspiring progressives in New York and nationally. “Tish James and the other state AGs on the front lines of this fight are not only defending a Constitution and federal laws against a Supreme Leader and lawless autocrats,” says Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD). “They are also showing the country what real attorneys general do by acting for the people and the rule of law instead of a right-wing political putsch.”
James and her partner AGs have hit the president with a barrage of lawsuits that have temporarily halted some of his worst orders in the past seven months. Their cases blocked efforts to freeze federal funding; stopped the termination of federal workers fired illegally; blocked Elon Musk’s DOGE from access to sensitive US Treasury material; halted Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s efforts to decimate Health and Human Services staffing; and temporarily restored $11 billion in health grants to states and cities. In early June, a court blocked the Trump administration’s move to shutter the AmeriCorps program after New York and 24 other states joined a lawsuit to protect the popular federal community-service initiative.
But while James is proud of the work of the AGs, she is honest about the fact that it isn’t nearly enough given Trump’s all-out assault on democracy. Congressional Republicans, James says, “have just handed over their authority to the executive. They, too, are afraid of MAGA. And they’ve just conceded their constitutional authority."
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