By Larry Bodine, LD18 Board Member
“There is a coup taking place against the American government and our institutions, and that is hurting Arizonans and Americans,” said Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, speaking at a standing-room-only town hall in Tucson last week.
Referring to the criminal president Trump, she said, “The American Constitution and our republic are under attack. We are in greater peril today than we have been in since the Civil War. I believe that.”
The Arizona Attorney General’s office has filed and won 7 lawsuits against the Trump administration to protect Arizonans:
- Protecting Birthright Citizenship and the 14th Amendment
- Blocking the federal funding freeze
- Stopping DOGE’s attacks on privacy
- Protecting medical and public health research
- Stopping Elon Musk’s unconstitutional power grab
- Stopping the indiscriminate mass firings of federal employees
- Protecting Arizona students and schools
Mayes said she will continue to fight to reverse Trump’s authoritarian overreach and protect Arizonans.
Fight back in three ways:
“The way we fight this is, I call it the three C’s. The way we fight this is crowds, and you guys are doing a really good job down here at Tucson. We fight in court. That’s my job. And third: courage,” Mayes said.
“We all have a role, and we are all Patriots at this time in our nation’s history. It’s up to all of us to play whatever role we can in saving this democracy. And sometimes, especially when I file one of these lawsuits or see one of those headlines, I can hear past generations of Americans speaking to us across time and space and the eighties, and they are saying to us, “Fight.”
“Fight for this country. And they did, and millions of them lost their lives fighting for this country. It’s the least we can do to show up in crowds and fight in the courts and have courage because when we do this together, they cannot beat us. And they will not beat us.”
Mayes teamed up with 23 state attorneys general across the US. “The first one we filed was against the executive order rescinding birthright citizenship. It was blatantly unconstitutional. It took a Reagan-appointed judge 25 minutes to call it blatantly unconstitutional and to issue a temporary restraining order (TRO), stopping it,” she said.
Trump defunds the police.
“The first lawsuit we filed was against the executive order rescinding birthright citizenship, which was blatantly unconstitutional. It took a Reagan-appointed judge 25 minutes to call it blatantly unconstitutional and to issue a temporary restraining order, stopping it,” Mayes said.
“And that was our first win. And we’ve been doing nothing but winning since then. Lot of winning now,” she said. Unfortunately, they keep coming at us with all of this illegality, but we filed a lawsuit to stop the federal funding freeze. It’s important to remember how catastrophic that was going to be.”
If we had not gotten a TRO against it, they were going to halt Meals on Wheels. They halted Head Start. They shut down the Medicaid portal for an entire 24 hours in this country and our state. The best example of how insane this is — they defunded the police in Arizona,” she said.
Trump defunded HIDTA, which is the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas program. Mayes works in partnership with HIDTA, the FBI, the ATF and the Joint Terrorism Task Force. “He defunded that. That’s what he did. Obviously, we sought a TRO against that federal funding freeze,” she said.
23 Attorneys General
Mayes meets on Zoom every day with all 23 fellow AGs from Hawaii to New York. “We are very committed to this. We are very unified.”
“The AGs are standing up for Congress’s prerogative. We have three branches of government — Civics 101, right? — Congress, Executive and Judiciary. That’s what this is all about. These monies were already appropriated. These programs were already decided on by Congress and the president does not have the authority to thwart them, to cut them, to decimate them. Full stop, doesn’t have the authority.”
She promised that the 23 AGs would not stop. “We will not stop. And I really feel strongly that once in a generation, Americans are called upon to fight for our country, to sacrifice for our country. And this is our time. This is our time to fight for our country.
“People ask me: aren’t you afraid of retaliation? Aren’t you afraid that you might lose your next reelection campaign? And I always say no. I’m afraid of looking back on my life at the end of my life and not believing that I did everything in my power to save this beautiful, precious, irreplaceable Re