From the New York Times, June 16/18:
An emerging coalition that views Donald J. Trump’s agenda as a threat to democracy is laying the groundwork to push back if he wins in November, taking extraordinary pre-emptive actions.
Opponents of Donald J. Trump are drafting potential lawsuits in case he is elected in November and carries out mass deportations, as he has vowed. One group has hired a new auditor to withstand any attempt by a second Trump administration to unleash the Internal Revenue Service against them. Democratic-run state governments are even stockpiling abortion medication.
A sprawling network of Democratic officials, progressive activists, watchdog groups and ex-Republicans has been taking extraordinary steps to prepare for a potential second Trump presidency, drawn together by the fear that Mr. Trump’s return to power would pose a grave threat not just to their agenda but to American democracy itself.
“Trump has made clear that he’ll disregard the law and test the limits of our system,” said Joanna Lydgate, the chief executive of States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan democracy watchdog organization that works with state officials in both parties. “What we’re staring down is extremely dark.”
While the Supreme Court on Thursday rejected an attempt to nullify federal approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, liberals fear a new Trump administration could rescind the approval or use a 19th-century morality law to criminalize sending it across state lines.
The Democratic governor of Washington State, Jay Inslee, said he had secured a large enough supply of mifepristone pills to preserve access for women in his state through a second Trump administration. The supply is locked away at a state warehouse.
“We have it physically in the state of Washington, which could stop him and his anti-choice forces from prohibiting its distribution,” Mr. Inslee said in an interview. “It has a life span of five or six years. If there was another Trump administration, it’ll get us through.”
There is always discussion in any election year of what might happen if the other side wins the White House. Such talk has been typically limited to Washington chatter and private speculation, as much of the energy has focused on helping one’s party win the election and develop wish-list policy plans.
But the early timing, volume and scale of the planning underway to push back against a potential second Trump administration are without precedent. The loose-knit coalition is determined not to be caught flat-footed, as many were after his unexpected victory in 2016.
If Mr. Trump returns to power, he is openly planning to impose radical changes — many with authoritarian overtones. Those plans include using the Justice Department to take revenge on his adversaries, sending federal troops into Democratic cities, carrying out mass deportations, building huge camps to hold immigrant detainees, making it easier to fire civil servants and replace them with loyalists and expanding and centralizing executive power.
Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, said the planning for how to resist such an agenda should not be seen as an ordinary policy dispute, but as an effort to defend fundamental aspects of American self-government “from an aspiring autocrat.”
“He is no normal candidate, this is no normal election, and these are no normal preparations for merely coming out on the wrong side of a national referendum on policy choices,” Mr. Bassin said.
The leaders of many of the centrist and left-leaning groups involved insist their energies are primarily devoted to preventing Mr. Trump from regaining power in the first place. Many are also wary about discussing their contingency plans publicly, for fear of signaling a lack of confidence in President Biden’s campaign prospects. Their angst is intensified by Mr. Biden’s low approval numbers and by his persistent trailing of Mr. Trump in polls of the states that are likely to decide the election.
Interviews with more than 30 officials and leaders of organizations about their plans revealed a combination of acute exhaustion and acute anxiety. Activist groups that spent the four years of Mr. Trump’s presidency organizing mass protests and pursuing legal challenges, ultimately helping channel that energy into persuading voters to oust him from power in 2020, are now realizing with great dread they may have to resist him all over again.
The group leaders say they learned a lot from 2017 to 2021 about how to run an effective resistance campaign. At the same time, their understanding of what Mr. Trump is capable of expanded after the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. They believe that the orbit around Mr. Trump has grown more sophisticated and that a second Trump White House would be both more radical and more effective, especially on core issues like immigration.
“What Trump and his acolytes are running on is an authoritarian playbook,” said Patrick Gaspard, the chief executive of the CAP Action Fund, the political arm of the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress. He added, “So now we have to democracy-proof our actual institutions and the values that we share.”
The Biden administration pushed through a flurry of regulations in the spring, meeting a deadline to ensure that those rules could not be summarily overturned next year under a 1996 law if Mr. Trump wins the election and Republicans take total control of Congress. But administration officials have generally been reluctant to engage in contingency planning, insisting they are confident Mr. Biden will win a second term.
Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman, denounced these efforts as a way to pre-empt Mr. Trump from being able to implement a legitimate policy agenda.
“It’s not surprising Biden and his cronies are working overtime to stymie the will of the American people after they vote to elect President Trump and his America First agenda,” Mr. Cheung said. “Their devious actions are a direct threat to democracy.”
Different groups worried about what a second Trump presidency could mean are also starting to think about how to work together.
Earlier this week, representatives from 50 national and local immigration rights organizations convened at a hotel outside Phoenix for a three-day retreat under the umbrella group Immigrant Movement Visioning Process. On the agenda for two days was “Scenario Planning: Post Election Readiness,” building on a four-hour exercise the group had conducted online in May, according to Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center.
And next month, the anti-Trump conservative group Principles First and Norman Eisen, who was a lawyer for House Democrats during Mr. Trump’s first impeachment and helped produce an “autocracy threat tracker” focused on Mr. Trump’s plans, are organizing a conference at New York University entitled “Autocracy in America – A Warning and Response.” They are inviting dozens of practitioners and scholars to discuss how to resist leaders with authoritarian leanings around the world, Mr. Eisen said.
Maurice Mitchell, the head of the Working Families Party and a co-anchor of Fight Back Table, a progressive coalition that formed in 2017, said activists opposed to Mr. Trump’s agenda were primarily trying to prevent him from winning. But he said they were also determined to be prepared if he does retake power and to stay out of each other’s lanes.
“A lot of folks are in the mind frame of, What can we learn from the past?” Mr. Mitchell said. “How can we apply those lessons going forward? And how can we think through the various scenarios that might present themselves, and how might we leverage everything that we have?”
A new litigation wave
A common tactic to push back against the first Trump administration was through litigation that tied up his policies in court. Sometimes that work succeeded in blocking actions entirely, and in other cases it delayed those policies from taking effect....
....MUCH MORE, a very extensive piece.
