What Schneiderman can do—one state AG, or even a number of state AGs—against the leader of the right-populist wave in the White House remains to be seen. On the policy level, lawyers in his office are confident that so much of what Trump has proposed so far is so poorly written, and even more poorly thought out, that it opens itself up to all kinds of lawsuits.
“We don’t know what the legal consequences are yet of a lot of these executive orders,” said Healy, the attorney general of Massachusetts and a close Schneiderman ally. “But we do know that you are going to see a federal administration that is going to be rolling back consumer protections, labor protections, environmental protections, and looking to dismantle rights that have been put in place. The way you address that is you uphold the law through the courts, and that is the job of state AGs right now.”
Among Schneiderman’s New York troops, there is the unmistakable sense of suddenly fighting on new terrain. The office feels like it is in the middle of campaign season, with the other side rolling out a series of unpredictable attacks over the course of the week, leaving New York to figure which to fight back on and how. Applications for new positions have soared, even from private-sector lawyers willing to forgo hundreds of thousands of dollars in pay to help take on Trump.
“We are the backstop,” added Alvin Bragg, a top deputy in the office. “The system is set up in a certain way, that if the federal government doesn’t do certain things, we have to step up and push back. If they leave things wide open, we have to step into the void.”
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