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“This agreement marks another important step toward restoring trust in our public institutions,” Kenneth Parreno of Protect Democracy said in a statement.
Alexandra Chandler, the legal director of Protect Democracy, a group that has clashed with Trump over his role in elections, said she was heartened by the lack of drama during the 2025 voting.
“We have so many positive signs we can look to,” Chandler said, citing not only a quiet election but GOP senators’ resistance to Trump’s demands to eliminate the filibuster and the widespread resistance to Trump’s demand that television host Jimmy Kimmel lose his job because of his criticism of the president. “There are limits” on Trump’s power, she noted.
“We will have elections in 2026,” Chandler said. “People don’t have to worry about that.”
The second lawyer to argue will be Amit Agarwal, who represents Rebecca Slaughter, the former F.T.C. commissioner who was fired by Mr. Trump.
Mr. Agarwal is a special counsel for Protect Democracy, which describes itself as “a cross-ideological nonprofit group dedicated to defeating the authoritarian threat.”
A former clerk to Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh will face long-odds in convincing his former bosses to uphold a 90-year-old ruling limiting a president’s ability fire top government officials at will.
Amit Agarwal, who also served as Florida solicitor general under now US Attorney General Pam Bondi, will appear before the justices Monday to defend Rebecca Slaughter, the Democratic Federal Trade Commissioner who sued President Donald Trump over her firing and teed up the case for the court.
“Federal hiring for career jobs is supposed to be based on merit, not politics,” Ori Lev, who represents the plaintiffs as co-counsel at the nonprofit Protect Democracy, said in an interview with FedScoop. “You want the best people in the jobs, regardless of whether they’re Democrats or Republicans or independents, and that’s true regardless who’s in office. That’s the system that Congress set up, because that’s the system that produces results for the American people.”
Lev said the essay questions are a “blatant attempt” by the Trump administration to politicize civil service.
In ordering these prosecutions, is Trump giving illegal orders? Former prosecutor Kristy Parker says that depending on specifics, bad-faith orders to prosecute foes while knowing the facts don’t warrant it can be unlawful. They might violate the target’s constitutional rights or run afoul of a federal statute barring officials acting under color of law from willfully depriving people of those rights, Parker says, which could apply to both the giver and the executor of the order.
“Just following orders” is “not a lawful defense,” Parker told me. “If the order is unlawful, you can’t follow it, and you’ll be in violation of the law yourself if you do,” she said, though it’s often unclear how legally vulnerable underlings would be later.
The debate Friday was often an exchange over how fusion voting fits into broader systemic reforms and if it can be used in tandem with proposals including proportional representation, multi-member congressional districts, ranked choice voting, gerrymandering prohibitions, filibuster reform and others.
“It makes it possible for people who want to organize and who want to create and claim their own political power, to do so in an effective way,” Beau Tremitiere, an attorney from the non-profit Protect Democracy, said. They’re exactly right. “People are deeply dissatisfied with the system. There’s a lot of energy to do something better and fusion makes that easier.”
People with experience analyzing SNAP and other safety net programs say such statistics need more detail and context about how they were calculated to be evaluated.
“We have real questions about how they’ve arrived at these numbers,” said Nicole Schneidman, an attorney with the nonprofit, Protect Democracy. Schneidman represents SNAP recipients and hunger and privacy groups who sued over USDA’s data demand to states.
“One thing that’s really important for people to keep in mind is that 42 million people across the country receive SNAP on a monthly basis. And so these numbers that are being referenced are trivial in the grand scheme of the millions of people across the country who are receiving SNAP,” Schneidman said.
Legal scholars say no president has attempted massive, unilateral cuts like these since Richard Nixon. The moves reflect an expansive view of executive power that is at odds with the Impoundment Control Act, court rulings and the Constitution, which grants Congress supremacy over spending, experts say.
“The power they’ve claimed is the power to delay and withhold funds throughout the year without input from Congress,” said Cerin Lindgrensavage, counsel with Protect Democracy, which is involved in multiple lawsuits against the administration. “That’s a theft of Congress’ power of the purse.”
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