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I feel like this kind of interstate lawfare is exactly what the interstate commerce provisions in the US constitution were meant to prevent.
But we are in a weird situation where the commerce clause covers everything, and states can also regulate anything and everything. Obviously there are going to be conflicting laws.
Interstate companies will be the first victims of this interstate tom-foolery. But make no mistake, they will not be the last victims. Large corporations are unsympathetic, who cares if wells fargo gets in legal trouble? As you pointed out they already committed mass fraud against their own consumers.
At some point more and more individuals will be caught up in interstate lawfare wars. Trump is just the tip of the iceberg. Something illegal in one state might be required in another state. And a company CEO operating in both locations will be an easy target.
By the time the courts really need the credibility to shore up these problems they will have burned it all on stupid political fights.
Trump isn't a victim of this kind of interstate lawfare. All his legal problems relate to behaviour which (if he did it) is illegal everywhere, and the claims of jurisdiction are pretty clear-cut.
Trump's current legal troubles are:
"This kind of lawfare" strictu sensu - i.e. seeking to regulate the worldwide behaviour of businesses outside your jurisdiction on the basis that they did some business inside the jurisdiction - has been SOP in the US for a very long time. From my perspective as someone who has spent most of my career working in non-US multinationals, the biggest issue is random insane civil verdicts in US state courts, but there are a number of federal policies which are also objectionable - especially sanctions on Cuba and the law attempting to punish companies for participating in the Arab boycott of Israel. Countries other than the US do not do this - for example the UK only attempts to regulate British companies and British-based activity of foreign companies. In general, countries other than the US take the view that, as applied to international trade in goods, this kind of behaviour violates the WTO treaty, which says that countries can only discriminate between identical goods based on whether or not they have a trade deal with the country they were made in, not on who made them.
What Texas is doing is something slightly different in that it ties the requirement to doing business with the Texas government, not to operating in Texas. This is less objectionable from a jurisdictional comity perspective, because the Texan government is acting as a market participant, not a sovereign, and has the right to choose who it does business with in the same way as any other entity (FWIW, I have no idea if the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th amendment does or should regulate States as market participants). This kind of behaviour used to be rare except for mission-driven organisations like charities and political parties - normal people care about what they are buying, may care about how it was made, but do not care about the general ethical record of the people making it. The idea that public sector customers should take an interest as customers in the out-of-jurisdiction activities of the companies they do business with is new - AFAIK it dates back to left-wing campaigns about corporate tax compliance in the noughties.
It will be interesting to see how Texas's attempts to enforce this against Wells Fargo pan out. If this was a term in a contract "Wells Fargo will not discriminate against a firearms entity" then at common law it would probably be unenforceable as a restraint of trade and/or a contract to break the law in a (legally) friendly jurisdiction. But making it a pre-contract enquiry means that Wells Fargo are pretty clearly guilty of a fraudulent misrepresentation.
This is the important point - a world in which every jurisdiction tries to regulate activity outside its territory - particularly if that regulation is driven by idiosyncratic local politics rather than being an attempt to enforce widely-shared norms - is very bad from the point of view of making it legal for normal people to do business normally.
Do you think those cases would have happened if Trump had not made himself a target by being a republican president? Or in an alternate dimension where Trump is democrat president and New York likes him, would they have found a way to bury those legal issues?
Is the EU starting to step into this territory? GDPR explicitly says it applies to EU residents. But it has ended up impacting most websites, since it is too easy to be an EU resident browsing a US website. There has also been recent multinational company mergers. I don't understand what happens when say the US approves microsoft and activision merger, but another country says 'no you cant merge'.
I think even regulating certain things inside your territory can have basically the same effect. California regulations have certainly reached a point of ridiculousness, where a bunch of products now have silly labels like "known to cause cancer in the state of California" as if cancer has some kind of geotagged activation key.
Also internet sales taxes, which quietly went away as an issue as soon as Amazon embraced them as a way to build a moat against competitors.
I’m with MadMonzer, for the most part. The political calculus for bringing anti-Trump cases does not change the legal jurisdiction.
Bragg is applying “falsifying documents” laws which are very clearly about documents within the state of NY. And which he has applied to other cases with non-Presidents. The novel, suspicious bit is making it a felony charge despite the apparent lack of a second crime. Not a jurisdictional problem, but an equitability one.
Surely the proper legal jurisdiction for deciding with whom the State of Texas should do business is in fact the State of Texas, though?
It's kind of identical -- NY would probably not be going after Trump if not for his annoying persistence in wanting to be President, and there would be no problem with Wells Fargo banking Texas if not for their (mostly non-Texas) actions against Ruger. The fact that both actions are taking place in the appropriate venues does not delete the fact that the States in question are using the venues to influence things within a wider jurisdiction. (and I'd suggest humbly that "who can run for President" is a more consequential thing than "who can bank with Wells-Fargo")
Small point, but I wouldn't say New York is going after Trump for "wanting to be president".
Just "wanting to make him suffer" is more accurate. Had he announced he wouldn't be seeking re-election after 2020, I'm fairly confident these cases would have proceeded regardless.
Well maybe sub "for presuming to have been president" -- I'm not convinced that he would have been pursued with such vigour if not for the clear and present danger that he might become president again, but either way it's pretty bad -- and a clear example of a state trying to influence national politics using state law. "Pour encourages les autres" in your scenario -- but I thought the really hinkey part of this was trying to have Trump banned from running again on the basis of some vague linkage between this NY civil action and a novel interpretation of some eligibility law? Or was that the Stormy situation, I can't keep track?
I think this is probably true. Most of the things he’s being charged with now happened decades ago. He didn’t recently try to take out a loan with inflated net worth. These events happened years ago, without comment, and without charges being filed. In fact if I recall correctly there was some concern in one of the cases that the statute of limitations would run out before the charges were filed. That’s not an evenhanded application of the law, and in fact is pretty good evidence that had Trump never been elected President, he would not be facing charges.
As far as ballot acces, I think Trump or his supporters would have a pretty strong argument that this is restraint on democracy in the sense that we’re essentially looking at a situation where one of the two major party candidates simply won’t appear on the ballot. Which means that essentially Joe Biden or the Democratic nominee if they need to put him in a care home, is simply handed the electors from any state that removes Trump with little recourse for republicans who will almost certainly nominate Trump.
Wouldn't their recourse be to not nominate Trump?
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