GOP lawmakers push to ban North Carolina from suing Trump, after lawsuits find success

North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson, a Democrat, has sued Republican President Donald Trump several times in Trump's first month in office. Now Republican lawmakers in the North Carolina Senate want to stop Jackson from doing it again.

So far, Jackson and other state Democratic attorneys general have defeated the Trump administration in the early stages of those legal battles — winning court rulings that have blocked Trump's attempts to undo birthright citizenship and slash funding for medical research, among other efforts.

Sen. Amy Galey, R-Alamance, called Jackson's lawsuits "political grandstanding" just before voting with fellow Republicans to advance Senate Bill 58 out of its first committee on Wednesday. If it becomes law, the bill would ban the state attorney general from participating in any lawsuits that target any executive order of the president.

Democrats countered that the only political grandstanding was the bill itself, and that Jackson has had real-world success protecting North Carolina and its people from what they see as harmful executive orders by Trump.

Trump has issued dozens of executive orders since becoming president. Democratic attorneys general across the country have sued over many of them. Jackson has had North Carolina join in some of those lawsuits.

"The attorney general’s duty is to be a nonpartisan shield for the people of North Carolina," Jackson spokesman Ben Conroy said Wednesday. "More than 70 federal executive orders have been issued. Attorney General Jackson has filed four federal lawsuits to protect billions in funding for western North Carolina, our public universities, and rural jobs."

Conroy added that so far, Jackson is winning all of those lawsuits. "Any legislation that undermines the independence of the attorney general's office is bad for our state and its people," he said.

Federal cuts affected Triangle jobs

Sen. Lisa Grafstein, D-Wake, said Trump's attempted cuts to the National Institutes of Health and other federal grant money threatened many jobs in her district and other parts of the Triangle — at businesses and nonprofits, as well as at public and private universities.

Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill are both among the top recipients nationally of NIH grants, receiving more than $1 billion combined last year. UNC also received a substantial amount of funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, another of Trump's targets.

Trump's USAID cuts have largely been allowed to go through, but his efforts to slash NIH grants have been held up by lawsuits.

Without Jackson's success blocking the NIH cuts, Grafstein said, there could've been even more layoffs than what's already been announced due to Trump's cuts. That includes a hiring freeze at N.C. State University as well as hundreds of layoffs and furloughs by Research Triangle International, FHI 360 and other Triangle-based organizations.

"There's a lot of fear and uncertainty," Grafstein said Wednesday.

The bill's lead sponsor Rep. Tim Moffitt, R-Henderson, said that didn't bother him.

"I’m not particularly sympathetic to people who are concerned their funding source is going to dry up," Moffitt told Grafstein.

Democratic lawmakers accused Republicans of being hypocritical, expressing serious doubts that the Republican-led legislature would be pushing to protect the president from lawsuits if Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris had beaten Trump in the presidential election. They also said the bill appears unconstitutional, violating the checks and balances written into the state constitution to separate the legislative and executive branches.

Moffitt disagreed. "We certainly can control what the attorney general can do," he said, adding that if Jackson is upset about it, he can always resign.

Extension of 'power grab' law?

Republicans already banned Jackson from engaging in other types of legal action they disagree with in a law passed in the 2024 lame duck session after Jackson defeated Republican Dan Bishop in the race to replace Gov. Josh Stein as attorney general.

That law banned Jackson from saying that anything the legislature does is unconstitutional. It also bans him from taking stances in court that Republican lawmakers disagree with.

Critics called that 2024 law a power grab intended to punish Jackson and the people who voted to put him in office. GOP leaders see this new bill as simply an extention of those efforts to limit the office's power, and to make the attorney general more beholden to the control of the state legislature.

Several members of the public spoke about the new bill Wednesday, all of them opposed.

Liz Barber, the policy director of the American Civil Liberties Union's state chapter, said the state's top lawyer should absolutely have the ability to sue over things that threaten the state.

"How can I explain this to a third grader?" Barber said. "He is the lawyer for the people."