When Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr filed suit against President Joe Biden’s coronavirus vaccine and mask mandate for the Head Start program, he said it unfairly forced parents to choose between their child’s education or their right to make health care decisions for themselves.
In opposition to Biden’s college debt relief plan, Carr said it would have imposed an expensive burden on American taxpayers. And when Biden allowed temporary migrant workers to form a union, Carr said the president was circumnavigating Congress.
Over his nine years in office, the Republican attorney general has been a thorn in the side of Democrats, wielding his legal authority frequently to challenge those policies in court.
As Carr campaigns to be Georgia’s next governor, these lawsuits provide a window into how he thinks, how he could run the office and his political strategy to win in 2026, legal experts said.
“If we had a Gov. Carr,” said Georgia State University law professor Anthony Michael Kreis, “I don’t think anybody’s going to be surprised what his agenda would look like. I think it would be very consistent with the litigation decisions he’s made.”
Carr has filed at least 17 lawsuits against Democratic presidents Biden and Barack Obama, many of which pertain to immigration, vaccines and transgender rights. He’s also filed legal briefs in support of President Donald Trump’s policies, a more common practice this year as Trump begins his second term.
In line with his conservative ideology, Carr has argued his challenges to the Biden administration were needed to prevent overreach from the federal government and protect states’ autonomy and individual liberties. A spokesperson for his campaign said the lawsuits have benefited people in Georgia.
“As attorney general, Chris Carr has strengthened border security, stood up for parents’ rights, safeguarded women’s sports and put a stop to unlawful mandates. He’s focused state resources on cases that make a real difference for Georgians,” said Julia Mazzone, a spokesperson for the Carr campaign.
‘Aspiring governor’
Serving as the state’s top prosecutor has become a platform to run for the state’s top executive job.
“The joke has long been that ‘AG’ stands for aspiring governor because so many attorneys general go from that role to running for governor,” said Quinn Yeargain, an associate professor of law at Michigan State.
That’s because being attorney general allows a candidate to position themselves as an advocate for the people.
If Carr were to win, he’d be joining governors in 11 other states (six Democrats and five Republicans) who previously served as attorneys general.
Carr has expanded his office’s reach to combat retail theft, human trafficking, gangs and the opioid epidemic.
But the politically charged lawsuits get more mileage.
“They’re not going to win an election because they got the settlement from an opioid lawsuit,” Yeargain said. “They’re going to win their primary because they took a really aggressive position as the best partisan Republican culture warrior, pro-Trump person.”
James Tierney, the former attorney general in Maine and a lecturer at Harvard, said he didn’t suspect there was a long-term strategy to the political lawsuits Carr signed on to.
“It just means he’s a Republican,” he said. “The reason he filed the lawsuits is because all the Republican attorneys general filed the lawsuits.”
Attorneys general who ascend to governorships bring a particular skill set, including knowledge of how to deal with an unexpected crisis, although they are completely different jobs, he said.
“If you’re going in at a time of dramatic financial cutbacks, then you better know somebody who knows how to make hard decisions,” Tierney said.
Carr’s record
Carr chose not to join a lawsuit seeking to block Trump’s cuts to biomedical research or one to force his administration to release billions of dollars in education funding or one challenging the elimination of a grant program that helps protect communities from natural disasters. But that’s not surprising, Kreis said.
“It’s just a function of partisanship and who’s controlling the levers of government at any given time,” he said.
In fact, Republican attorneys general file lawsuits against Democratic presidents just about as often as Democratic attorneys general sue Republican presidents, data has found.
“We all tend to be hypocrites,” Kreis said. “We see things that we like, and we say those are constitutional. We see things we don’t like, and we say we’re suspicious of that.”
In reviewing Carr’s tenure as attorney general, Kreis said there’s an “absolute inconsistency” in his views on the division of power between the national and state governments. But it’s nothing anyone else wouldn’t do in similar offices across the country, he said.
Carr’s campaign says Carr would get more done with Trump as president.
“With a partner in the White House, Chris is a proven leader who will bring that same fight to the governor’s office, delivering results that matter,” Mazzone said.
In January as Biden was leaving office, Carr joined with three other Republican attorneys general to reverse a ban on offshore oil and gas drilling. The Republican-controlled state House of Representatives passed a resolution in 2019 opposing drilling off Georgia’s coast, but Trump ran for reelection on the promise of greater drilling for fossil fuels.
But Carr has not always been in lockstep with Trump and the MAGA wing of the GOP.
He refused to join a lawsuit that would have thrown out the 2020 election results in Georgia and other states. Carr said he looked into allegations of wrongdoing but decided against seeking charges, and the U.S. Supreme Court threw out the case.
“You’re not going to take a legal position if you don’t also believe it as a matter of policy,” Kreis said. “I think people generally tell us who they are in these legal decisions.”
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