Attorneys general in left-leaning states have been crowding into courtrooms to sue the Trump administration. This spectacle, the growing tangle of hastily issued injunctions preventing the enforcement of presidential executive orders, might lead some to think that they are observing the reverse side of a familiar pattern—one in which the party that lost a national election sends its state-level proxies into federal court to harass the party that won the White House.
Since 2010, states have sued the federal government with increasing frequency. But the apparent similarity in strategy does not mean that those lawsuits have similar merit or that they meet with the same sort of reception in the courts.
My colleagues have already explained why the states are not entitled to the judicial injunction stopping the Trump administration from pausing foreign aid and other federal…
