Using the threats for settlements in the courts as a way to get around lawmakers making policy…
Helping Trump & Co. ‘Rule’ in THEIR way around the 250 year American Democracy System….
Last June, the Trump administration hauled Texas into court, claiming that a decades-old state law once championed by Republicans violated federal law.
Within six hours, the two sides reached an agreement.
Instead of fighting, Texas immediately settled. Led by Attorney General Ken Paxton, a close ally of President Trump, Texas simply agreed the state law, which allowed undocumented high school students to pay in-state tuition at public universities, should be invalidated. The resolution eliminated any need for a slow and messy vote to overturn the statute in the State Legislature.
It was one of a string of lawsuits in which the Trump administration has reached settlements with friendly adversaries.
The strategy appears to have allowed the administration to do an end run around the legislative process and enact policies that will affect states and, in some cases, the whole country.
The settlements have come despite Supreme Court rulings that require lawsuits to be waged between adversarial parties and a reticence among administration officials dating to Mr. Trump’s first term with entering legal settlements that bind the government’s hands.
In some cases, like in Texas, the legal maneuver has allowed states to quietly break free from their own laws, outside the normal legislative process. In others, it has helped the Trump administration lock in changes at the federal level that could persist for years after Mr. Trump leaves office.
In Florida, for instance, the Trump administration in February reached a legal settlement with the Republican-led state requiring the Department of Homeland Security to forgo one of its authorities to admit immigrants for 15 years. Though reached with a state government, the settlement could affect immigration policy for the whole nation, through the next four presidential administrations.
In Kentucky, the federal Transportation Department proposed a settlement in a case with a pair of industrial companies challenging decades-old racial and gender-based preferences, acceding to the businesses and agreeing to end use of the preferences in its contracting nationwide….
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