DAVID BLACKMON: Holding No Levers Of Power, Democrats Focus On Lawfare To Slow Trump Agenda

It is no secret that Republicans now control all levers of political power in the nation’s capital, with President Donald Trump now ensconced for his second term in office, holding narrow majorities in both the House and Senate, and with a solid originalist majority on the U.S. Supreme Court. It is also no secret that, as its political might has faded over the last decade, the Democratic Party has come to rely increasingly on a variety of lawfare campaigns to impede the ability of Republicans to enact their agenda.

One early manifestation of Democrat lawfare efforts came when then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi mounted her first sham impeachment targeting Trump in 2018 with Daniel Sachs Goldman serving as general counsel for the impeachment committee. That effort at political lawfare came up a crapper in the Senate, but Goldman has been rewarded by the party and its voters with a congressional seat representing the 10th district in New York.

Democrats and their supporting activist NGOs also fought Trump’s first term agenda with an organized lawfare effort to file challenges to most every administration initiative with friendly federal district judges who happily issued a seemingly endless series of nationwide injunctions designed to gum up the works. We saw another example of this on Tuesday when Biden-appointed federal district Judge Loren L. AliKhan blocked Trump’s order to temporarily pause federal grant, loan and financial assistance programs after 22 Democrat state attorneys general filed suit.

Georgia Democratic Sen.  Raphael Warnock responded to Trump’s order on Thursday by calling it “an assault on the American Republic and the attempt to replace it with their dystopian vision of the future,” adding, “We’ve got to fight back.” Obviously, lawfare will be his and his fellow Democrats’ favored tactic to deploy in that effort.