AP
A left-wing legal group with a deceptive name is proving to be the biggest obstacle to translating President Donald Trump’s massive 2024 election victory into real change.
The mission of Democracy Forward: thwarting the choices of the 77 million voters who supported Trump for president.
The group sues the Trump administration repeatedly, venue-shopping for sympathetic district court judges — the lowest federal jurists on the totem pole — who then act as stooges, issuing national injunctions to halt Trump’s agenda.
Never mind how flimsy or outright false the legal claims.
The brain behind Democracy Forward is the scandal-plagued Democratic lawyer Marc Elias, who chairs the group.
He’s the same culprit whose fingerprints were all over the fake anti-Trump Steele Dossier in 2016, launching the “Russia collusion” narrative.
Elias was also behind the state-by-state changes in election law intended to tilt the scales against Republicans in 2020.
On Friday, Democracy Forward struck again, as US District Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco issued an order suspending Trump’s plans to shrink 21 federal departments and agencies — everything from the departments of Energy, Commerce and Labor to the Social Security Administration, the Small Business Administration and the National Science Foundation.
In terms of sheer size, this is the most consequential nationwide injunction slapped on Trump yet.
Democracy Forward claims to be upholding democracy itself.
As its website declares: “At this critical moment, when those who were responsible for January 6th have returned to power, we must use the law to defend our democracy and build for a better future.”
There’s the big lie — the insidious suggestion that Trump “returned to power” through some illicit coup.
Truth is, he was elected by huge popular and Electoral College majorities.
Candidate Trump’s winning agenda included pledges to drain the federal swamp, shrink the size and cost of government, and eliminate 10 regulations for every new one slapped on the public.
All those goals are fatal to the interest groups and unions that feed at the trough of an ever-bigger government — and that’s who Democracy Forward is fighting to protect in Judge Illston’s court.
The judge insists her ruling is intended to “protect the powers of the legislative branch”; she argues the president must consult with Congress to make “large-scale overhauls of federal agencies.”
Many previous presidents have consulted Congress in such instances, and Illston pointed to language in the US Code saying that the president “shall” submit reorganization plans to Congress.
But it’s a weak argument. Article II of the US Constitution puts the president exclusively in charge of the Executive Branch — and any statute that impinges on that authority may be unconstitutional in itself.
That’s how two higher federal courts in other parts of the country have ruled, but Illston says she’s not bound by other circuits’ decisions.
Yet Illston’s argument reads like a mere pretext, not a sincere attempt to protect Congress.
After all, Congress isn’t suing to seek the judge’s protection.
Look who is suing: the nation’s four largestpublic employee unions, including the American Federation of Government Employees and the Service Employees International Union — despairing that Trump’s layoffs will cut into the dues they collect, and mean more work for members still on the job.
This is a lawsuit to protect the gravy train.
Joining the lawsuit are Democrat-run cities and states. Where will their funding come from, they cry?
The city of Baltimore contends that when its federal employees are laid off, the city collects less tax revenue — as if the layoffs would keep Baltimore residents from finding work in the private sector.
The gist of the argument is this: The federal government must only get bigger, never smaller. It’s crazy.
In March, Democracy Forward launched a similar lawsuit to stop Trump’s reorganization of the Department of Education, with Randi Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers as the lead plaintiff.
As part of her plea, Weingarten whined that Trump’s plan would funnel education funding directly to the states — possibly resulting in tax dollars funding private-school vouchers.
Sorry, Randi. That’s an issue that should be decided by elections, not lawsuits.
Democracy Forward CEO Skye Perryman has boasted that long before Trump’s victory, the group created a spreadsheet of his likely policies and plotted legal actions against each one.
Seeking national injunctions has been their most corrupt weapon.
But this week their strategy could hit a brick wall: On Thursday, the US Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case on Trump’s birthright citizenship policy — when the justices are expected to slap urgently needed limits on injunction-happy district-court judges.
Not a minute too soon. Limiting national injunctions will rein in the left-wing litigation complex — and handcuff Elias.
Don’t let the name of his latest operation fool you: Democracy Forward is really democracy undone — a planned assault on your right to choose.
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York and co-founder of the Committee to Save Our City.