The state attorneys general are as mad as you are

The sun was already beginning to set as Portlanders in weatherproof jackets and fleeces lined up around Revolution Hall. It wasn’t yet 5PM on a Wednesday but the crowd was gathering well before the town hall was scheduled to begin. Just a day earlier, news outlets reported that Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison had been targeted by a federal Justice Department subpoena. Now Ellison was in Portland, at the invitation of Oregon’s attorney general, along with three other Democratic attorneys general, for a town hall. When he was introduced on stage, an auditorium full of Oregonians gave him a standing ovation.

The town hall, said Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield, was being held so the AGs could hear what people wanted them to focus on in the coming year. But there was one thing he wanted everyone to hear: “We are not backing down. There is no way in hell we are going to let this president continue to chip away at our rights and our democracy at this time. We are going to continue to fight for this entire term and do our job as attorneys general.”

This was the overall theme of the evening. “Whenever you’re confronted by a bully like Donald Trump, if you think by keeping your head down and being quiet, being sweet, nice, that he’s not gonna stomp all over you, you are wrong,” said Ellison. “The only solution is to stand up, fight back, and protect your own.”

“If the president crosses the line, violates the law, violates the Constitution, we’re gonna fight him,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta. “Period. Full stop. No passes. Every single time.”

“A Republican-led Congress is doing nothing,” Bonta said. “They are supine. They are not a check… but we’re a check. We’re the check when you need the checks and the balances.”

The Constitution, Bonta said, was “built for this.” Even if the separation of powers at the federal level had failed, the separation between the federal government and states was still in place. In other words, the last check on Donald Trump was states’ rights.

A year ago, a coalition of Democratic state AGs filed the first of many lawsuits against the second Trump administration, seeking an injunction against an executive order that purportedly ended birthright citizenship. Birthright citizenship is in the US Constitution. It is not possible for the president to change the Constitution by fiat. In other words, the executive order — like so many things yet to come — was complete bullshit.

The AGs sued Trump the very next day. Having gotten a good sense of what Trump was capable of in his first term, the state AGs began to work together well in advance, getting on daily phone calls. There were 23 AGs total (24, now), but they were working together smoothly, said Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez. “What we’re doing is too serious, too important to let our own egos get in our way.” The phone calls slowed down over time but their staffers continued to be in near constant communication.

Over the next few months, the AGs would file lawsuit after lawsuit, enjoining the Trump administration from its illegal attempts to withhold Congressionally appropriated funding from the states while DOGE hijacked the federal government. Then came the tariffs; the AGs sued over that too.

The Democratic AGs collectively filed over 70 lawsuits against Trump in just one year. Not all of the states were parties in all of the cases (for example, California is in 54 of them; Oregon is in 53). For the most part, it appeared the court orders were working. Certainly, each of the attorneys general had secured billions in Congressionally appropriated funding for their states — even if laws aren’t real anymore, money sort of is.

Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey said he would “welcome Republican attorneys general” to join them on the cases, noting that the Republican AGs had stayed out of the fights altogether. Instead of joining the Trump administration on the other side, they had simply let the Democratic AGs sue over SNAP benefits and research dollars and more, securing nationwide injunctions that benefited Republican constituents too. “They are sitting off in the corner, just letting us do the work,” said Frey. “Democratic attorneys general are fighting for that so that Republicans can sit on the sidelines and sort of wait to pop up every now and then and say, ‘Trump, what can we do for you?’”

Withholding food from children was bad enough, but by the summer, Trump’s grudge against the blue states manifested as boots on the ground. ICE swept through California; when the scourge of masked federal agents was met with protests, Trump deployed the National Guard. As protests surged through Portland, Oregon, he tried to deploy the Guard there, too. When Chicago met ICE with resistance, once again, he tried to deploy the National Guard.

After the Supreme Court handed him a quiet, but pivotal loss in the National Guard cases, Trump “withdrew” the National Guard from those states and turned his attention to Minnesota.

The ICE surge in Minnesota has left a woman dead and Minneapolis a ghost town as residents shelter in place. Trump’s DOJ is currently withholding access to evidence from the state of Minnesota in the case of the killing of Renee Good, and is instead trying to prosecute the governor and the mayor, and maybe now Attorney General Ellison, too. The states’ rights against the federal government — protected by the Tenth Amendment — have been at least implicit in every lawsuit the AGs have filed. And Ellison was hardly the first of the state AGs to attract Trump’s ire — as the AGs themselves were ready to point out, their colleague New York Attorney General Letitia James had been targeted by the president in retaliation for previously prosecuting him. But the attacks on Minnesota and its officials reached a new level.

Just before the town hall, a reporter asked Ellison about the difficulty states faced in prosecuting federal agents like the ICE agent who shot Renee Good. “The idea that they’re absolutely immune is a misstatement of the law, and it is a dangerous misstatement of the law, because I don’t want any ICE agent or Border Patrol agent or any agent to think that they can just kill people and then that’s it,” Ellison told the group of reporters. Then he asked rhetorically: “What about Ruby Ridge? You ever heard of that one?”

Years after an FBI sniper shot Vicki Weaver at Ruby Ridge, the state of Idaho prosecuted the federal agent. The federal government went to bat for the agent, claiming that he was immune under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. The Ninth Circuit ruled that Idaho was allowed to prosecute the sniper — similarly, Minnesota is also entitled to investigate and potentially prosecute the officer who shot Renee Good.

But a different example loomed larger in Ellison’s mind: the Boston Massacre of 1770, where British soldiers shot into a crowd, ultimately killing five people.

“It’s not exactly analogous, but we are talking about local authorities in Boston, prosecuting imperial agents of the colonial power, the central government, in England. And they were prosecuted. Two of them were convicted. John Adams actually represented a few of the imperial officers.”

The Boston Massacre, said Ellison, was obviously “in the mind of the framers of the Constitution” at the time the document was written.

“They were thinking about this event, and they would have never conceded the state’s authority to prosecute a federal officer,” said Ellison, going on to add, “The states of the United States pre-date the United States. It is federal courts that are limited. Not state courts. State courts have plenary power.”

He finished with a dramatic flourish: “It’s true that the feds are denying us access to the investigative file. It’s also true that there’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

Perhaps the most dissonant part of the town hall in Portland was how unpolished most of the state AGs were as public speakers. Although they are electeds who belong to the Democratic Party, and some of them probably aspire to hold higher office later, they often lacked the smooth rolling syntax of the true politician. And none of them stuck to diplomatic messaging.

But what they had to say was met with uproarious cheers and echoing applause. As Portlander after Portlander approached the mics to ask their questions, the state AGs faced virtually no pushback or criticism. At one point, Rayfield revealed that he had bought matching frog hats for the state AGs on stage. When Ellison modeled the hat, the audience went wild.

It was a far cry from the chaotic, adversarial town halls faced by politicians early last year. And the deep frustration that the audience felt about Congress was echoed by the AGs — it seemed like the AGs were just as angry about the country as, say, the average Bluesky poster.

“We see a Congress, led by Republicans, in the House and the Senate, that have failed at their stewardship job of being the first branch of government and holding the second branch of government accountable under our laws,” Frey told reporters before the town hall.

“We are the only government agencies fighting against this federal administration,” said Lopez. “The only government officials. Which, at this point, should be startling to everybody, because as everybody has said… ”

Lopez broke off and paused before continuing. “I don’t even think that they care about it,” she said, seeming to refer to the Trump administration. “They don’t care about making excuses about it … I think the sycophants who are following this president are willing to sell their souls for whatever he is looking for. Because what they’re saying, what they’re doing, is so unconscionable on a daily basis, so immoral, that all of us need to be able to understand, there’s no way that they’re ever going to let up. We have to fight.”

There was one glaring omission in their talking points. The AGs did not address the issue of the Trump judges who pack the federal judiciary — including the US Supreme Court, which has ruled that the president is absolutely immune for official acts. This is unsurprising, since the AGs have to stand before these very judges; nevertheless, this point of critical failure in the constitutional order is no small detail. Still, when the state AGs emphasized that the courts were still handing them victories, and that even SCOTUS seemed persuaded by their arguments in the tariffs case, they weren’t lying. Even if the American system of government is falling apart, it isn’t yet dead.

During the town hall, both Ellison and Bonta mentioned racial profiling and the attacks on DEI — they were also, perhaps, the two most adamant advocates of states’ rights. States’ rights have long been a conservative talking point, first as a rallying cry for the pro-slavery insurrectionists of the Civil War, and later as a dog whistle for segregation. The history books could not have anticipated this: the state AGs are now using states’ rights to press forward with a vociferous defense of civil rights.

For the large part, institutional Democrats have not thrown in their lot with the protest movements of the last year. But the state AGs seemed to see themselves as — if not a part of — at least dependent on a mass movement.

“Crowds are super important,” said Bonta in the town hall. He seemed to be genuinely on the verge of tears. “That is the rawest, most powerful expression of our democracy. When people show up, whether it’s Hands Off or No Kings, we are speaking about what we will never accept and what we demand.”

When Rayfield described tiplines and webforms that the AGs had created so ordinary people could engage in recording federal misconduct, Ellison chimed in.

“Can I just note real quickly, that now we need everybody to use these things,” he said, waving his smartphone in the air. “The videos — they have been remarkably helpful.” Ellison said “much of the evidence” in Minnesota’s latest lawsuit against Trump had been acquired “because of you.”

“We will not save our country in a courtroom,” said Ellison. “We have to fight them in a courtroom. We absolutely have to. But ultimately, this country will be saved by the people of the United States. And so that — you protesting, you gathering evidence, you sharing it with us, you communicating with us — is action. It’s actually how we’re going to win.”

The populism, the anger, and the unapologetic combativeness on display was a little strange, to be sure. But this month we’ve seen Minneapolis under siege, a woman shot through the side window of her car, an elderly American citizen dragged out of his home dressed in Crocs and underwear, and a five-year-old Minnesotan child detained and flown to Texas. It would have been much stranger if the mood of this town hall had been more restrained. Things are not normal. Things are not okay. The state AGs are meeting an unhinged moment exactly where it is.