To combat Trump, Democrats ready a GOP tactic: Lawsuits

Under President Bill Clinton, attorneys general pioneered the major multistate lawsuit that has served as a model for interstate collaboration since, with nearly all the states joining together to win a groundbreaking settlement with the tobacco industry. Liberal states later collaborated to force the E.P.A. under President George W. Bush to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, winning a Supreme Court decision that made it easier for the states to sue the federal government.

It was under Mr. Obama that states came into their own as political activists. One group of Republican attorneys general began holding weekly conference calls to strategize ways to weaken the Affordable Care Act months before it became law in March 2010, filing their lawsuit minutes after Mr. Obama signed the bill.

For the moment, the precise shape of Trump-branded targets is hard to make out. At the annual meeting of the National Association of Attorneys General in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., two weeks ago, bipartisan bewilderment about the president-elect’s true intentions abounded. (Republican state attorneys general will slightly outnumber Democrats in 2017.)

“People are coming up to me and saying, ‘What’s going to happen?’” said James E. Tierney, a former attorney general of Maine, who ran a program studying attorneys general at Columbia Law School. Mr. Tierney, a Democrat, now lectures at Harvard Law School. “There’s a lot of eye-rolling down here, in both parties, like, ‘Oh my God.’”