The Legend of the Ninety-Nine Lawsuits

Governor-Elect Bob Ferguson likes to tout his record of success suing the first Trump administration while he was Attorney General. According to his office, the state filed or joined 99 lawsuits against the federal government between January 30, 2017 and January 19, 2021, and won the vast majority of them. (Full disclosure: I represented clients in one of these cases—the one challenging Trump’s rescission of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program—that wound up going to the U.S. Supreme Court.) According to the Attorney General’s Office, “almost all of the costs of this litigation, and the expansion of our civil rights division and other civil law enforcement divisions, were funded by our agency using recoveries from successful litigation. These were not general fund dollars that would have otherwise gone to other purposes. Our office is revenue-generating (returning $70 for every $1 provided by the Legislature).”

These stats are great PR. They helped land Ferguson on TIME Magazine’s 100 influential people list in 2017, and they may have helped carry him to the governor’s mansion.

But the real win-loss record is a bit more complicated. Sure, Ferguson won more than he lost—but many of his wins were only short-term, or split decisions. It’s likely he wasn’t the thorn in Trump’s side that it seemed…

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