High above Hollywood Boulevard, overlooking the iconic TCL Chinese Theater and the masked marvels prowling the Walk of Fame, an elite “League of Justice” assembled on Tuesday to prepare for battles that lay ahead.
They view their adversary — President Trump — as being more powerful than ever. Now, the avengers agreed, they were the “last bastion of defense” for the masses.
“The stakes couldn’t be higher right now,” said New Jersey Atty. Gen. Matthew Platkin. “What we’re seeing is a scope and a scale and a pace of illegal and unconstitutional activity that has not been seen in American history.”
For the Democratic Attorneys General Assn., a political action committee-turned-judicial alliance of progressive top cops, the Hollywood policy conference was a chance to plot their next move in an ongoing barrage of lawsuits against the Trump administration.
Their stated aim is to thwart a constitutional crisis many believe is already underway.
“This is just the beginning,” said Illinois Atty. Gen. Kwame Raoul. “We’re talking on a daily basis as to how we combat this attack on our republic, this attack on our Constitution, and the attack on the rule of law writ large.”
Delaware Atty. Gen. Kathy Jennings pointed to calls emerging from Trump supporters for the president to ignore unfavorable court rulings in order to implement his agenda.
“I believe it’s a crisis already,” Jennings said. “What if we’ve done everything we can possibly do and they still don’t obey? That’s the existential threat.”
Their host was more measured.
“I believe our system is durable,” California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said. “We are being stress tested, but we’re durable.”
The AGs are not looking for a fight, they insisted.
Still, barely three weeks into the second Trump presidency, 23 of the nation’s most powerful lawyers had together filed at least six of the more than 60 lawsuits brought against the chief executive and his allies.
Defending the Constitution is not what Bill Lockyer had in mind when he helped form DAGA with a small cohort of like-minded AGs in 2002.
“We were very modest when we first began,” said the former California attorney general, who left office in 2007 after nearly three decades in public life and now works for the law firm Brown Rudnick. “The Democratic side is typically outspent, so they have to try to work together to overcome that obstacle.”
Republican attorneys general had organized their own affinity group in the 1990s. Under former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the GOP moved aggressively to make state offices more partisan, pumping cash into down-ballot races.
“I was one of several who thought there should be a counterpoint,” Lockyer said.
The Republican Attorneys General Assn. did not respond to request for comment.
The Democrats’ association remained fairly loose, raising a few million a year until 2016, when the group moved to D.C. and hired a full-time staff. During the next election cycle, it raised double what it did the previous year and quadruple its annual take before 2015.
Last year, DAGA pulled in close to $20 million, drawing from the likes of Stephen Spielberg and the Communication Workers of America. Elon Musk’s X and TikTok also both contributed.
By February of 2024, its members were already hashing out a contingency plan for a second Trump presidency. They pored over Project 2025, the 900-page policy manual written by Trump’s first-term alumni and other right-wing wonks, in the hopes it might telegraph the administration’s early moves.
“We have to always be anticipating what might be a threat,” said Mass. Atty. Gen. Andrea Campbell. “Because we were prepared, we were able to respond quickly.”
At their November policy conference in Philadelphia, they hardened their defenses. California alone earmarked $25 million to “Trump-proof” Bonta’s office.
“It would have been a dereliction of our duties to not have spent the time we spent preparing,” Platkin said.
At their Hollywood conclave, clad in silk ties and enamel state pins, the people’s lawyers traded inside jokes and warm embraces, even as they prepared to face an existential threat.
“We truly are friends as well as colleagues,” Jennings said.
For many, the meeting had the feeling of a last stand.
“[During Trump’s first term] I never felt that we were losing our democratic system, our separation of powers, our three branches of government,” Jennings said. “I feel we are in that crisis now. And it feels very different.”
One topic of debate was how to defend the rule of law while bringing their lofty principles down to earth.
“There was collective passion [within DAGA] to uphold the rule of law in our Constitution and to get the average person to understand why this was important,” said Campbell, the Massachusetts AG. “It’s not just that it’s the Constitution — it’s a contract between the government and you.”
Campbell said she and her colleagues strategically included the city of San Francisco in their challenge to Trump’s order ending birthright citizenship. They wanted to make a tangible connection with Wong Kim Ark, the San Francisco man whose landmark 1898 Supreme Court case extended the rights of the 14th Amendment to the children of immigrants.
U.S. District Judge Leo Sorkin ruled in their favor in Boston on Thursday, enjoining the order that had already been blocked by federal judges in Washington, New Hampshire and Maryland.
DAGA members won other early suits in district court and felt confident they would win again in those that advanced to the liberal circuits where most had been filed.
“[Even] Republican-appointed judges have stood up for the rule of law,” Jennings said. “It was a Reagan-appointed judge who issued the decision in the birthright citizenship case [in Washington] and he only took 25 minutes to declare President Trump’s executive order blatantly unconstitutional.”
But the AGs worried what might happen if one of their challenges reached the Supreme Court, where the conservative majority and its three Trump-appointed Justices have sometimes set aside precedent for the president’s agenda.
“At some point soon the United States Supreme court is going to be tested,” Mayes said. “Does the U.S. Supreme Court believe in the separation of powers? Does the U.S. Supreme Court believe in the rule of law? And that moment is coming very soon.”
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