NC voters elected a Democratic attorney general. Republicans want to curb his power | Opinion
Since Jeff Jackson took over as North Carolina’s attorney general, he’s used the office in part as a line of defense against President Donald Trump.
Jackson and Democratic attorneys general across the country have been steadfast in challenging the most egregious of Trump’s executive orders, including his attempts to end birthright citizenship, freeze federal funding and give Elon Musk and his staffers access to federal payment systems that contain sensitive personal information.
That’s not sitting well with Republicans, who have now introduced a bill in both the N.C. House and Senate that would prevent Jackson from participating in any litigation that seeks to invalidate one of Trump’s executive orders.
Of course, Jackson’s approach to the role is neither unusual nor unprecedented. During Trump’s first term, Democratic attorneys general filed more than 100 lawsuits challenging actions they believed to be dangerous and unconstitutional. Then-Attorney General Josh Stein participated in many of them, including challenges to Trump’s ban on travel from Muslim-majority nations and a Title X gag rule that obfuscated access to abortion care.
And when Democrats occupied the White House, Republican attorneys general never hesitated to do the same. Ken Paxton, the Republican attorney general of Texas, sued the Biden administration 100 times in four years, a “historic milestone” that his office celebrated. His predecessor, Greg Abbott, sued the Obama administration nearly 50 times.
“Attorney general is an important position that people often don’t pay a lot of attention to,” Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University, told me. “But in a time where we’ve tried to limit gubernatorial power in lots of states, including our own, the attorney general has been able to continue mostly untouched until now.”
The fact that Republicans are so determined to restrict Jackson’s ability to challenge Trump only underscores the significance of the role. It comes just a few months after the legislature limited the attorney general’s powers as part of a wide-ranging bill that sought to take power away from incoming Democratic officials. That bill prohibits Jackson from taking any legal stance that contradicts the legislature if a state law faces challenges in court.
The fact that it’s Jackson who occupies the role is significant, too. Republicans wouldn’t have introduced this legislation if Dan Bishop had been elected attorney general, and they wouldn’t be introducing it if Kamala Harris were president right now, either.
“In another universe, Dan Bishop wins, and there is no attempt to change the power of the Attorney General in North Carolina,” Cooper said. “This is clearly driven by partisanship and what the Republicans view as Democratic overreach.”
Ironically, naked partisanship is one of the accusations that GOP leaders have lobbied against Jackson in their attempt to justify the bill. Senate leader Phil Berger told reporters earlier this month that voters “had a good feeling of what they were going to get” with Trump, and he criticized both Jackson and Stein for “[expressing] their personal views in litigating against the federal government.”
But if Berger is using electoral outcomes as a signal of what North Carolinians want, he’s leaving out something: the voters who elected Trump also elected Jackson. Voters knew what they were getting then, too, and if they wanted the attorney general to act like a Republican, they presumably would have elected one. But they didn’t, and lawmakers are now trying to undermine the will of the voters by changing the nature of the job they elected Jackson to do just three months ago.
While some may view the lawsuits as purely political posturing, it’s also true that the executive actions they’re fighting would have a real impact on North Carolina. Proposed cuts to National Institutes of Health funding, for example, would deal a massive blow to universities like UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke, who stand to lose hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding if attempts to block it are not successful. The damage caused by Trump’s federal funding freeze would have been even more widespread.
But whether you agree with Jackson’s actions or not, this just isn’t the way things are supposed to work. Changing the statutory responsibilities of an office simply because the person who holds it wears different political stripes is wrong, no matter who does it.
