muh resistance
https://archive.ph/znYL9
Actually, the #Resistance is working
David Weigel and Kadia Goba
Feb 13, 2025, 3:48am UTC
politics
The News
The new resistance to Donald Trump’s presidency had== a plan: State attorneys general from Maine to Hawaii would rush to court to stop vast portions of the agenda Trump had spent years promising to deliver.
And it’s working: Democratic attorneys general and the Democracy Forward coalition of liberal lawyers have been winning== in court and throwing up hurdles to his agenda. Skeptical judges have kept federal workers in their jobs, unfrozen billions of dollars in grants, and preserved birthright citizenship; Democracy’s own network of partner organizations has grown from around 180 after the election to more than 400 now.
“The Trump administration spent years preparing for the blitz of executive orders we’re seeing now — but the legal strategy is working,” said Democracy Forward President Skye Perryman. “The early wins we’ve seen so far are just the beginning of our coordinated legal strategy.” Congressional Democrats agreed with her.
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“We’ve had a great deal of success with preliminary injunctions, temporary restraining orders in the courts,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer told Semafor on Wednesday. “I think there are close to 50 suits filed, and on almost every major issue, the courts have put a freeze on stopping the DOGE people from implementing what they want to implement.”
“Democratic attorneys general are currently batting a thousand at getting injunctions, which is great,” said Indivisible co-founder Ezra Levin, who cautioned that the final outcome “remains to be seen.”
On the other hand: There are no mass protests on the Mall, few stirring speeches, and many, many angry social media posts. Around the country and on Capitol Hill, Democrats sure don’t feel like they’re winning.
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Rallying against Trump’s executive orders, Congressional Democrats have been heckled by protesters who ask what they’re actually doing. New polling from YouGov this week found that two-thirds of Democratic voters want them to “oppose Trump as much as possible.”
“We’re going to fight on your behalf in the Congress, we’re fighting on your behalf in the courts and we’re going to make sure we do what we need to do in the community,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said at a Tuesday rally organized by the American Federation of Government Employees. It’s the first part — a congressional battle that isn’t slowing Trump down — that’s been frustrating progressives.
“That’s the sales pitch?” scoffed “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart on Monday, after playing New York Rep. Dan Goldman’s take that House Democrats couldn’t stop Trump without Republican defections. “You can see the Democrats’ backbone on our new show, ‘America Backslides,’ starring Dan Goldman as Hopeful Loser!”
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Title iconDavid’s view
One particularly demoralizing storyline for Democrats — not that they have many helpful ones to choose from — is that they are so overwhelmed by the speed of the Trump administration that they don’t know how to fight it.
That’s not really true. There was a playbook in place for a Trump restoration, built during the 2024 campaign, when the party messaged relentlessly against the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda and tried to make its authors famous. (Quick: Name a former OMB director who’s not Russ Vought.)Democratic legal groups and attorneys general previewed their plans in The New York Times one week after Kamala Harris’ defeat.
Then they executed the plan. There’s a debate happening among liberal lawyers about which cases are the strongest, and which ones risk an adverse precedent if they get to the Supreme Court — a 6-3 supermajority less friendly to them at any time in the first Trump term. But the goal was stopping as much of the agenda as possible, and some of that has worked.
But the faces of this are dispersed and often obscure state attorneys general (Tish James in New York, Rob Bonta in California, Andrea Campbell in Massachusetts) who don’t have their own press corps or big social media personae. The media apparatus that covers Congress has watched Democrats lose, then gotten them to explain why they lost, repeatedly. On social media, there’s been particular progressive angst about Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly, who beat New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for the chief House Oversight role, and whose biggest early move — subpoenaing