WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump may be about to face a familiar foe he fought when he was in office: Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.
Shapiro, now considered a potential running mate for Vice President Kamala Harris after President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race, built his national profile while he was the commonwealth’s attorney general, challenging Trump’s policies and fighting his efforts to overthrow the 2020 state law. election results.
Shapiro’s battles with Trump “were a big part of raising his profile and cementing a real track record on a lot of important issues,” said JJ Abbott, who at the time was a spokesman for the then-governor. Tom Wolf.
Within days of taking office in 2017, Shapiro was part of the coalition of state attorneys general who opposed Trump’s proposed travel ban on people entering the country from Muslim-majority countries.
And when Trump left office four years later, Shapiro was heavily involved in efforts to respond to the many lawsuits challenging Biden’s victory, including in Pennsylvania itself.
“We worked a lot together on a lot of different cases,” Brian Frosh, a Democrat who was Maryland’s attorney general at the time, said of Shapiro. “He is very intelligent, very capable. He is a worker. He’s willing to take risks.”
When he ran for governor in 2022, “a big part of Shapiro’s appeal to voters was that he stood up to Trump and election deniers,” Frosh added. Shapiro’s Republican opponent, Doug Mastriano, was himself an election denier who traveled to the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Frosh said Shapiro’s investigation into sexual abuse allegations against the Catholic Church was a model for his own investigation in Maryland.
Shapiro is just one example of how politicians have used the previously sleepy position of attorney general in recent years to catapult themselves into high-profile political careers. Other examples include Harris herself, who was California’s attorney general. The approach also worked for Republicans, including Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who were attorneys general for their states.
The easiest way for newly appointed attorneys general to make a name for themselves these days is simple: generate national headlines by opposing the president in high-profile litigation.
This is exactly the approach taken by Shapiro.
He helped coordinate Democratic attorneys general as they supported lawsuits against the travel ban brought by attorneys general in Washington state and Virginia.
Democrats strongly condemned Trump’s policy, saying in part that it discriminated on the basis of religion by targeting Muslims. The ban was implemented after Trump oathd during the campaign to implement “a total and complete shutdown of Muslim entry into the United States.”
At the time, the newly elected Shapiro Brushed concerns that joining the legal effort could hurt him politically in a state that Trump won in the 2016 election.
“This order seeks to keep our communities safe, protect our economy and uphold the rule of law,” Shapiro said in a statement. announcing the archiving of one of the documents against the travel ban.
Courts blocked Trump’s initial travel ban, allowing Shapiro and the other attorneys general to claim victory. (Trump later issued an amended travel ban, which Shapiro decided not to challenge. It was ultimately maintained by the Supreme Court.)
Shapiro, whose office declined to comment on his role as attorney general, continued to butt heads with Trump.
A lawsuit he helped lead took aim at a Trump administration effort to undermine the Affordable Care Act’s so-called contraception mandate, which required employers to ensure that health plans cover contraceptives. The administration issued a regulation that expanded religious and moral exemptions from the requirement.
The Supreme Court in 2020 ruled in favor of Trump in a 7-2 vote.
Shapiro returned to the national spotlight later that year, as Trump and other Republicans fought in court before and after the November elections over voting-related issues.
One element of the pro-Trump election denial narrative centered on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision to extend the deadline for receiving mail-in ballots in the swing state in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. The measure was supported by Democrats, including Shapiro.
US Supreme Court conservative majority in October 2020 refused to intervene in Pennsylvania, at the request of Republicans, but that did not stop the idea that Democrats had trampled on election laws from taking hold on the right.
That led to a lawsuit filed by Texas later in the year seeking to invalidate Biden’s election victories in key swing states, including Pennsylvania.
At the request of Shapiro and other state attorneys general, the Supreme Court quickly rejected this process too.
“Our nation’s highest court has seen through this seditious abuse of our electoral process,” Shapiro said said at the time.
His involvement in the 2020 election cases “only solidified him as the leading Democratic candidate and front-runner” for the 2022 governor’s race, said David La Torre, a Republican consultant in the state.
“It certainly didn’t hurt him,” he added.
This story originally appeared on NBCNews.com read the full story
