State Attorneys General Ask Courts to Preserve Biden-era Gun Control Measures
The New York Times
Days before Trump returns to office, the legal fight with Democratic state officials over his agenda has begun.
More than a dozen state attorneys general, all Democrats, asked on Thursday to join federal legal efforts to preserve two Biden-era gun control policies, a signal of partisan legal fights to come as President-elect Donald J. Trump returns to power.
The two policy shifts are different. One would require buyers at gun shows to undergo a background check, a rule by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that is almost sure to clash with the views of Mr. Trump, who promised in a campaign speech to the National Rifle Association to “roll back every Biden attack on the Second Amendment.” The other, to ban a kind of trigger that can make a semiautomatic weapon fire like a machine gun, is similar to a policy that Mr. Trump embraced in his first term when he banned so-called bump stocks, which achieve the same purpose.
But the intervention is the first sign that partisan legal fights are likely to begin on Day 1 of the Trump White House, despite the wishes of some Democratic politicians who have called for a more cooperative stance toward the incoming administration after four years of incessant fighting in Mr. Trump’s first term.
“We know it’s a very real likelihood, based on what the president-elect has said, that his Justice Department won’t defend these rules,” Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin of New Jersey said in an interview, referring to Mr. Trump, who becomes president on Monday. “States like New Jersey will be harmed.”
After Mr. Trump’s victory in November, some Democrats called for compromise where possible. The move by the attorneys general shows they are more than ready to go to court to block Mr. Trump’s aggressive agenda, as many did during his first term.
Mr. Platkin’s office led a motion filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for North Dakota as well, this time to intervene on behalf of a group of undocumented immigrants. That case, which began as a lawsuit by 19 Republican states against the Biden administration, challenges a policy that allows some undocumented immigrants already legally authorized to stay in the United States to also receive subsidized health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.
