(Bloomberg) -- Washington state’s incoming attorney general, Nick Brown, is gearing up for a high-stakes clash with the second Trump administration, pledging to fight back against Republican policies on immigration, abortion and the environment.
At the same time, the Democrat says he’s ready to collaborate with Donald Trump’s enforcement agencies and even Republican-led states, on issues like antitrust and consumer protection — a balancing act he frames as essential to his role as the state’s chief law enforcement officer.
Brown takes over an office that, under predecessor Bob Ferguson, built a reputation for resistance by lodging nearly 100 lawsuits against Trump during his first term, including the first challenge to his travel ban on some majority-Muslim countries. Ferguson, who was elected Washington governor in November, has been part of a coalition of blue-state AGs meeting weekly since the start of Trump’s first term.
Now, as Brown prepares to chart his own course, he faces dual pressures: defending Washington’s progressive values in court while seeking some common ground with a Republican administration promising to dismantle much of what his state has long championed.
“I’m not looking to pick a fight with the incoming Trump administration, nor do I expect to turn to litigation as a first resort,” Brown said. “Where it makes sense to seek dialogue and collaboration — and I think there could be some places where it is in the best interests of the people of this state to do so — I am willing have those conversations.”
Speaking in an interview in Seattle, Brown said he would be open to joining the administration’s antitrust and consumer protection cases, describing that as part of the broad responsibility of his office, even if that’s harder than it would have been under a Democratic president.
Brown, 47, steps into the AG’s role after a career in private practice and as the US attorney for western Washington in the Biden administration. After graduating from Morehouse College and earning a degree from Harvard Law School, he joined the Army, where served in Texas and Iraq, earning a Bronze Star, according to his campaign biography.
He will lead an office with roughly 800 lawyers at a time when Washington state has cemented its status as a liberal bastion. While Vice President Kamala Harris lost ground to Trump in every state compared with Joe Biden in 2020, that shift was smaller in Washington than any other state besides Utah, where retiring GOP Senator Mitt Romney, a Trump critic, remains popular.
Brown said he and the other Democratic attorneys general are looking at how best to challenge the federal government. They’re assessing potential areas for litigation, including over Trump’s proposed immigration policies and the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Brown may also work with third parties, for example, to demonstrate harm in an effort to protect existing climate policies, he said.
“One of the things that Republican AGs did successfully during the last four years is they partnered more with individual plaintiffs and organizations to bring challenges to Biden administration rules,” Brown said. “So that’s something that we’re thinking about.”
It could be harder now to get the kind of broad injunctions that Ferguson secured in 2017. Since then, the US Supreme Court has raised concern about the overuse of judicial blockades, like the one used twice to halt Trump’s travel ban. The high court, now more conservative than it was early in Trump’s first term, has indicated in cases over the Affordable Care Act and deportations that it might be less tolerant of lower courts making sweeping policy decisions that affect the rest of the US.
New Challenges
Attorneys general may also face a more sophisticated opponent, as those in Trump’s orbit are more likely to enact policies capable of surviving procedural challenges, Brown said.
Even the logistics of challenging the Trump administration could be different as courts get bogged down after the Supreme Court overturned the decades-old Chevron doctrine that allowed federal agencies to make policy without congressional approval, Brown said.
Brown is also bracing for the norm-shattering nature of the incoming administration. As a former US attorney, Brown said he’s especially concerned about Trump and his allies demonizing the Justice Department. He said Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist nominated to run the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is a “conspiracy theorist” whose nomination is troubling, especially for the field agents across the country far removed from the politics of Washington, DC.
But it was actually Brown’s work in the Justice Department that he cites to explain his openness to collaborating with some of Trump’s appointees and allies. He hinted at glimpses of that cooperation at last week’s bipartisan meeting of incoming attorneys general in the nation’s capital.
“What I’ve experienced thus far is that most AGs are very willing to talk to other AGs about policy issues and law issues,” Brown said. “I am always listening to countervailing viewpoints.”
(Updates with additional comment from Brown beginning in fifth paragraph.)
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