A number of top Trump administration officials, fresh off securing major judicial wins in their fight against President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda, are preparing a new set of legal challenges to throw at the new president, this time focusing on the administration’s energy and environmental permitting policies.
America First Legal, the litigation outfit launched by a top Trump White House adviser Stephen Miller that boasts former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on its board of directors, forced Biden’s Small Business Administration on Monday to halt a pandemic relief program that “unconstitutionally” excluded certain applicants on the basis of race, Meadows said in an interview outlining the group’s plans.
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AFL has one very public, very specific goal: stall or outright rollback Biden’s policies through judicial means. And Meadows said he and Miller “talk, probably a half-dozen times a week” about which of Biden’s policies are ripe for court challenges.
“Every time there is a headline, or lurch to the left, that we’re seeing coming out of the Biden administration, we’re on the phone within hours, looking at how do we make sure that it is fair to all,” the former North Carolina congressman added.
“We’ve also pushed out looking at a number of items where we look at, at some of the COVID-related administrative policies that are coming and the injustice of some of that as it relates to higher learning and universities — what they’re requiring individuals to do, whether it be mass mandates or vaccinations,” Meadows added. “We also are looking at some of the environmental and energy issues, so we’ve been working with the attorneys general on both Florida and Louisiana on some of the energy issues, as well as Texas public policy and Ken Paxton in Texas.”
Though he went light on the specifics to avoid providing the Biden administration an opportunity to prepare for their legal challenges, he told the Washington Examiner to expect to “start to see additional actions” on “the issues that pop up with permitting” in the near future.
Since leaving government in January, Meadows has been working full time at the Conservative Partnership Institute to help coordinate and streamline the various conservative groups launched by former Trump officials, including AFL, the Center for Renewing America, and American Moment.
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The groups themselves vary drastically in both scale and focus, and Meadows noted that the relatively small AFL, which only employs a handful of operatives, can be “very, very agile” in reacting to Biden’s policies.
“I think probably the thing that makes us most effective is that we don’t have this huge behemoth that has to take months to turn around, that we file lawsuits immediately,” he added. “Stephen Miller and his team at AFL and our group here at the Conservative Partnership Institute are working on FOIA requests and looking at other areas that we believe are target-rich environments in terms of government overreach, and so, I don’t know that a week will go by where you don’t see something coming from this partnership that, quite frankly, I’m excited about.”
