Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. In Trump 1. 0, a loose coalition of democratic attorneys general worked to resist the administration’s forays into lawless power grabs. In Trump 2. 0, the chief law-enforcement officers of 23 blue states have become an organized, surgical, and vital bulwark against the White House’s assaults on the Constitution. California Attorney General Rob Bonta has been one of the busiest. On this week’s Amicus podcast, Bonta explained his state’s developing litigation strategy to Dahlia Lithwick. Their conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. Dahlia Lithwick: If my math is correct, as California’s attorney general, you are now signed off on 46 lawsuits against the Trump administration. That is a lot. How does your office decide what’s worthy of a suit and what goes on the back burner? How do you decide what’s a priority? Rob Bonta: We don’t have the luxury of choosing. We have one simple position: If Trump breaks the law and it hurts the state of California, we sue him. If he doesn’t break the law, we don’t. So if he decides that he’s going to issue an executive order on Inauguration Day, after he just raised his right hand and swore to defend the Constitution, then goes into another room to issue an executive order that violates the Constitution, we sue. He decides he’s going to issue an Office of Management and Budget memo that tries to withhold $3 trillion worth of critical funding to the states that Congress has already appropriated, we sue. He decides he’s going to impose unlawful tariffs, or invade the privacy of Americans through DOGE’s access to bank accounts and Social Security information, we sue. He decides that he’s going to deploy the National Guard unlawfully to states, then we respond. We stand at the outer boundary of his authority, and we say, You cannot cross this line. We are here to push you back and to cabin you, and we hold you accountable to the actual authority that you have, but you can’t cross this line. You can’t take Congress’ authority, you can’t take this state’s authority, and you can’t violate the Constitution. And we meet him in court every time. We don’t want to sue him 46 times. I’d rather have sued him zero times, because that would mean he’s following the law. I think I have to ask you about the Netflix movie that plays in my head, in which all of the state attorneys general are sitting around on Zoom calls and war-gaming what’s coming next and what the states can do. This is not really a model that we thought about in law school, right? This is a new way of thinking about states and federalism and state power. This surging into the legal void by state elected officials and state law and state supreme courts to act as a bulwark against creeping authoritarianism-this is so not the way we learned to think about justice. What have you learned from the work you’re doing with other states and the work you’re doing inside your state about whether these litigation strategies might be a way out of this mess? When I was in law school, I dreamed about having a job in the law that was meaningful, that made a difference, that advanced our society and protected people’s rights. I wanted to use the law as a force for good. I never could have imagined I would be the attorney general of California, working with my incredible colleagues, a total of 23 Democratic attorneys general, fighting to defend the bedrock principles of our nation, our Constitution, the separation of powers, checks and balances, congressional authority, state sovereignty, rights, and freedoms, or that I’d be fighting to protect those things against the federal government, a federal government that would be weaponizing the government to try to undermine all those things. That wasn’t on my bingo card. But sometimes you don’t pick the moment, you don’t pick the scenario, it picks you. So we are all attorneys general in this moment. I couldn’t be more proud of my fellow AGs and of what we’ve created as a team, as a coalition of states. This model emerged in Trump 1. 0, when AGs started banding together, but it was a little more loose. There were far fewer cases. The pace was different, the stakes were different. I was a legislator at the time in California, watching it up close and personal and seeing the cases filed, and I’ve always called that “the rise of the AGs.” We have continued to be on that trajectory. The fact that it would be state AGs exercising state sovereignty, reminding the federal administration of separation of powers, checks and balances, acting as the constitutional authority holding the federal administration in check, wasn’t necessarily what I planned on, but it’s the brilliance of the design of our American democracy that there are checks and balances all over the Constitution and they can be ignited and used at the appropriate time. Here, it’s states led by state AGs pushing back against the unlawful conduct of the federal administration. Thus far, I’m grateful to say, we’ve been overwhelmingly effective, with 80 percent of the orders in our cases being in our favor and blocking and stopping unlawful conduct quite often. I’m not sure that you intended to say this, but I’d absolutely love it if you did. You said, “We are all attorneys general,” and I love that as a model of thinking about all of our roles going forward. Every single one of us has a responsibility, very similar to the one you just described, of seeing unlawful action and calling it out and fighting against it. Yes, we in the states have our own formal role as attorneys general. We’re in courts, and courts are a place where the law is applied to the facts and justice is delivered. But three things are really important right now. I call them the three C’s: courts, crowds, and courage. We state AGs are in courts, and others are in courts, including private plaintiffs, holding this administration accountable-but it’s important that everyone know that they have a role to call out unlawfulness and to call out injustice. Crowds are important, whether it be on “No Kings” Day or Hands Off marches, when the people come out en masse to remind this administration who their boss is. Trump’s bosses aren’t his billionaire buddies or greedy corporations. His boss is the people, you and me, us and we. We will have the final say. We’ll write the next chapter in the story of America. And, finally, courage is important. There’s a lot of intimidation, targeting, attempts to silence. Everyone in this country has an opportunity, and I would even say a duty and an obligation, to exercise the most potent power that there is, which is people power-to speak up against injustice and to call out unlawfulness and to demand more and better of our administration. AGs will play our role, but everyone has a role, and I encourage everyone to lean into that role in this moment.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/11/california-attorney-general-rob-bonta-trump-lawsuits.html?via=rss