These State Leaders Might Be the Last Line of Defense Against Trump's Abuses of Power
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While Donald Trump continues to trample over local authority in Democratic-led cities like Los Angeles and Washington, DC , institutions like universities, law firms, and hospitals are capitulating. This erosion of accountability and—let's be honest—courage has meant that state attorneys general have been left to defend the rights of their residents.
On this week's episode of Amicus , Mark Joseph Stern spoke with New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin about the role state AGs play in this phase of Donald Trump's abuses of power. Platkin's team argued the birthright citizenship case at the Supreme Court this summer. Their conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Mark Joseph Stern : Your office led one of the major lawsuits against Trump's attack on birthright citizenship and is still fighting this out in the lower courts after the Supreme Court rolled back the universal injunctions that had previously been issued. This is another thing that Trump has ordered that has a nationwide scope. The impact is not limited to New Jersey. Why spring into action then rather than sort of wait and see what harms it might inflict? Why step into the fray immediately?
Matthew Platkin: This one was very easy. The president attempted for the first time since the Civil War to rewrite the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution in a way that said babies born on US soil were not in fact entitled to the rights and privileges of United States citizenship. And what would have happened would have been devastating for our state. We administer a whole range of benefits, educational benefits, health care, a whole host of other social services that depend on your citizenship status. And the federal government has never made any attempt to say how states could possibly administer this type of new citizenship status they didn't even bother to define—people who were born here, but were somehow not citizens of another country, but also not citizens of this nation. I also think we need to think about the human impact. If you're an expecting mother in South Jersey, Pennsylvania is not in the lawsuit. And you're thinking, Well, I was going to deliver at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, or I shop in Pennsylvania. What if I go into labor? Is it really the case that we want to tell those mothers and those families that their children born on US soil, that it depends either on the stroke of a pen of a president or on which state they happen to be in at the time they go into birth? We've never treated citizenship like that. So the stakes were really high. And if we didn't act quickly, and if the court didn't act quickly, the consequences would have been devastating.
Trump has made it very clear that he doesn't think democratic legislators really have a legitimate right to govern. As a DC resident, I am acutely aware of that fact right now. We saw it with the mobilization of the National Guard in Los Angeles this summer. How do you counter that as an attorney general beyond filing these lawsuits in federal court? What can you do under state law to try to protect your residents from what's emanating from the White House?
I think it's a core question right now. This administration has fundamentally disregarded the rights and privileges states have to govern themselves within the authority delegated to states under our Constitution. For us, it's very simple. Our state laws, our state Constitution, provide protections, and those protections are clear. For instance, we have the oldest and strongest civil rights law in America. Twenty years before we had a federal Civil Rights Act, the state of New Jersey had a law against discrimination. My office enforces that statute and protects people's rights. And we do that regularly. But we're seeing the federal government either engage in a frontal assault on these rights or just pull back from their own enforcement obligations and essentially leave the space open to states. So it's now the case that if you live in a state that doesn't enforce these protections, your rights and privileges differ from states like New Jersey, where we are protecting people's rights.
Is it surprising at all to you that these Republican AGs are just sitting it out and risking some severe and avoidable harm to their residents and presumably their voters?
It is surprising to me and it's disappointing. Look, I sued the Biden administration. I publicly disagreed with the Biden administration. My job is to protect the people of my state. And if the shoe was on the other foot and this was a Democratic administration doing these types of things, and I had to go to the 9.5 million people of New Jersey and say, “I'm sorry, the president is unlawfully taking away your health care and telling your kids with special needs that they're not going to get the services they're entitled to, but I'm of the same party as the president, so I'm not going to do anything,” I literally couldn't sleep at night. And so I think we do really need folks to step up. And I'm proud of the folks who have joined us, the Democratic attorneys general across the country who have been working literally around the clock in our offices. But these are not, in most instances, they really aren't controversial questions. And in fact, until very recently, there was broad bipartisan agreement that a president couldn't do these types of things illegally and in contradiction to passed laws by Congress and signed into law.
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