There are 194 Democrats in the House, and another 46 Democrats in the Senate.

But since Donald Trump took office, 22 state attorneys general have played among the most pivotal roles slowing and stopping the march of the Trump agenda.

Nineteen state AGs sued to stop the administration from withholding Obamacare subsidies from states, 16 to halt the rollback of environmental regulations, and 20 to reverse its decision to rescind a program that had protected young immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children from deportation.

In what remains their most visible victory, the lawyers won court orders that effectively froze three versions of Trump's travel ban, which had largely sought to bar residents of certain Muslim majority nations from entering the U.S.

Most of the lawsuits, just weeks or months old, are still making their way through the courts. Few so far have had the rapid and resounding success of the early victories that halted the travel ban. But the pace has been unrelenting – and, it would seem, unprecedented, with nearly two-dozen multistate lawsuits brought against Trump in his first nine months alone.

"Who's going to be there to defend students or residents or consumers or the environment when this administration is upending so many long-standing protections and turning the rule of law on its head?" Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, a Democrat, says. "The role of AG has never been more important."

With Republicans in control of not only the White House and Congress, but most state legislatures, the Democrats serving in the office of attorney general – once a staid backwater mostly seen as a political steppingstone – have become the bulwark to Trump, doing more to resist than any march or petition or tweet storm could hope.

And with the Justice Department's special counsel having apparently teamed up with New York's attorney general in the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, efforts at the state level might not merely frustrate the presidency, but perhaps even prove even fatal.

Yet not all Democrats are cheering. Some fear that each new lawsuit along party lines threatens to further fray the rope that had – at least ostensibly – held AGs' offices above the day-to-day politics that were once relegated to other offices like governor or senator or president. It's a trend that's undoubtedly transforming how the states' top legal officers – the people's lawyers – do business, shifting the U.S. legal and political landscape in ways that have yet to be fully understood and may very well prove irrevocable.

"The more AGs act like congressmen, the more they'll be treated like congressmen," says James Tierney, a former Democratic attorney general of Maine and a lecturer at Harvard Law School who's carved a niche consulting both Republican and Democratic AGs and studying the office he once held. "It's endangering the very function of attorney general."

Rise of the Activist AG

State legal challenges against the federal government are hardly new. But the GOP could be said to have built the modern template for the coordinated, multistate challenges being unleashed today.

Among the first and most prominent was the 26-state challenge to the Affordable Care Act – an action that had been in the works months before it was finally filed in March 23, 2010, minutes after President Barack Obama signed the act into law. More legal challenges quickly followed.

As the GOP wrested control of the House from Democrats and gained crucial seats in the Senate in the 2010 midterms, Republican lawmakers embarked on a campaign to stop Obama's legislative priorities at virtually every turn. As the Senate's top Republican, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, told the National Journal one month before the election, "the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."

The strategy forced the president to carry out much of his agenda through the executive branch, pushing regulations through agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency or issuing enforcement directives and executive orders. With Congress deadlocked and largely unable to stop these measures, Republican attorneys general from Texas to South Carolina began filing lawsuits to halt the measures from taking effect.

From 2009 through 2016, state attorneys general brought 59 multistate lawsuits against the federal government – most by Republicans, but a handful by Democrats, too, according to data compiled by Paul Nolette, a political scientist at Marquette University who studies the office of attorney general. Texas, alone, was listed as a lead plaintiff in nearly a third of the cases.

"I go into the office in the morning. I sue Barack Obama, and then I go home," former Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who served as state attorney general before moving to the governor's mansion, said while serving as AG in 2013, a line he used often.

President George W. Bush's administration, by comparison, faced 45 multi-state lawsuits. President Bill Clinton's administration was named in 18.

The number of multistate lawsuits brought against the federal government by state AGs has sharply increased in recent years. (Paul Nolette, "Federalism on Trial: State Attorneys General and National Policymaking in Contemporary America")

Much of the GOP's legal effort during the Obama years was aided by the Republican Attorneys General Association, a group formed in 1999 to help elect GOP AGs in states across the nation. In the 18 years since its launch, it's brought in millions of dollars of year in donations, much of it from private corporations.

RAGA says that the surge in litigation by its members has simply been a reaction to the excesses of the Obama administration, which Executive Director Scott Will accused of "deciding to govern by executive fiat."

"You could look at the number of regulations and executive actions that the president put forth, and Congress couldn't do as much that state AGs could," Will says. "You saw Republican candidates begin to campaign on pushing back against that overreach in general. And that's allowed for us, RAGA, to increase not just our fundraising advantage, but the quality of our candidates as well."

Democrats, by contrast, contend that the Republican strategy was simply an outgrowth of the "obstructionism" that GOP lawmakers were pursuing in Congress. But with the two sides' roles now switched, and Republicans now in control of the White House, left-leaning AGs maintain that their side's legal challenges are seeking more than to simply frustrate the administration, despite any similarities their strategy may have to the Republican playbook.

"You saw a number of frivolous lawsuits that were just obstructionist and attempts to obstruct in any way the Obama administration," Healey, the Massachusetts AG, says. "This isn't about obstructing, it's about standing up for the rule of law. You see that in standing up for women's access to birth control, you see that in standing up against the travel ban."

Trump, in his first two weeks in office, was hit with more than 50 lawsuits from state AGs and others. By May, he'd been sued in federal court more than 130 times. At least 25 of those challenges have been led by state AGs. Many of the lawsuits, which once could take weeks to put together, are now being filed in a matter of days.

"Given the trendline, the total number of suits will likely surpass all of Obama's total in just Trump's first couple of years," Nolette, of Marquette, says.

Democrats aren't alone in ramping up the pace of their legal challenges – including filings that don't even make it before a court. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, for example, said this week that he'd had an amicus brief ready to file in the event the Trump administration decided to continue opposing a ruling allowing an undocumented teenager in federal custody to get an abortion. Paxton, a Republican who expressed "profound disappointment" in the court's decision to allow the abortion to proceed, took the highly unusual step of making the draft of his brief public, which stirred concern among some legal observers.

Greg Zoeller, who served as the Republican attorney general of Indiana from 2009 to 2017, says that the state AGs' new activism is "a reflection of the failure of the legislative branch to check executive authority. The need for states to check federal authority is only necessary because of our dysfunctional Congress."

The Trump administration, in particular, has been bedeviled by infighting among the president's top aides, internecine warfare between the White House and Capitol Hill, and fractious disagreements among GOP lawmakers in Congress. High-profile bills on marquee issues such as health care have suffered devastating losses as Republican senators defected. Legislation on other priorities like immigration reform remain far beyond the horizon, although Trump and congressional Republicans say such measures are coming soon. And most recently, Sen. Jeff Flake and Sen. Bob Corker, Republicans from Arizona and Tennessee, respectively, have blasted Trump's leadership as they've announced their decisions not to seek re-election.

Frustrated in Congress, Trump and his Cabinet members have taken up their pens and phones, harnessing the authority of the executive branch to enact their goals through other means – even as Trump criticized Obama for doing the same – such as by threatening federal funding for cities that do not fully comply with immigration enforcement or rolling back regulations that would limit power plant pollution.

Trump signed his 50th executive order Oct. 12, nearly twice the number that his predecessor signed by the same point in his presidency. And each, it seems, has been met with a lawsuit.

"It's quite dramatic just in terms of the sheer number of multistate lawsuits that have picked up over the last several months. But the thing that really stands out to me that does seem to be really a new development is just the speed," Marquette's Nolette says. "Even in contrast to the [George] W. Bush administration, the Democratic AGs – 16 or 18 of them – are this solid coalition that constantly communicate with one another about strategies and getting other AGs to sign on. It's almost like a rapid-response group now in the way that it wasn't before."

The Democratic Attorneys General Association says it's played a crucial role bringing about that shift. In the past year, as RAGA announced it would end an informal agreement between the two groups not to attack each other's incumbents, DAGA has sought to turbocharge its fundraising and outreach, in effect playing catch-up after launching some 15 years after its Republican counterpart.

"We're looking for competitive advantage; we're going to fight more in this cycle than AGs have ever fought, and the fights matter," DAGA Executive Director Sean Rankin says of the coming year. "If Donald Trump understood the rule of law, if he were to enforce the regulations that are there, Democratic AGs would not be filing the way they are. But we face a situation where the president is stepping on the rights of people at every turn and seemingly not understanding that he's doing it, so we're forced to act."

DAGA and RAGA have together poured more than $6 million into the Virginia attorney general's race alone. And when the Republican group announced Thursday that it was spending $550,000 – bringing the group's total spending in the race to $4.1 million – DAGA answered the same day that it would dish up another $725,000, bringing its total to $2.25 million.

"This is the arms race," Rankin says, "not a litigation arms race" but "bigger donors" and "real infrastructure."

Last year, DAGA brought in about $5.2 million in donations, and through the first half of this year collected roughly $3.1 million. It's also expanded its footprint, relocating last year from Denver to a shiny new office in downtown Washington, reaching out to companies in Silicon Valley, and hiring Rankin, a longtime Democratic political operative, as its first full-time executive director, along with a new communications director and a policy director.

DAGA's fundraising efforts still trail far behind those of its rival. Last year, RAGA raked in about $14.5 million in donations – nearly three times what DAGA raised – and through the first half of this year brought in about $7.4 million, more than twice DAGA's total. (DAGA points out that it did not have a finance team in place until the second quarter of this year.) Like DAGA, RAGA has also hired up, bringing aboard the spokesman from House Speaker Paul Ryan's political team.

Some legal observers are mostly untroubled by the trend – either the influx of donor money or the vast increase in litigation brought by Democrats and Republicans. State attorneys general, they say, are filling a crucial role in the country's democratic system, checking the power of the executive branch in lieu of a broken Congress.

"States are filling the vacuum," says Jed Shugerman, a professor at the Fordham University School of Law who's written about the role that state AGs may play in the Justice Department's Russia investigation. "Our system is designed to have a lot of flexibility for these checks and balances. So state AGs in my view are playing their role in our constitutional system."

RAGA and DAGA, meanwhile, have largely shrugged off concerns about how state AGs' newfound prominence on the national stage may be fundamentally changing the work of their offices, which was once largely grounded in local issues like consumer protection.

"It's fair to say that the role of the AG has changed significantly over the last nine or 10 years, and a lot of that change was brought on by what we're talking about today – Republican AGs finding success in challenging federal regulations that hamper business and the jobs climate and the states' ability to govern themselves," Will, RAGA's executive director, says. "What I'm focused on, and what our group talks about, is the impact they've been having in continuing to repeal the regulations that came down over the last eight or nine years."

Others, though, are not so sure. The office was always political – after all, attorneys general are elected in 43 states and appointed by the governor in six. (In Maine, the attorney general is elected by the state legislature.) Even so, compared to other political offices, theirs is one that's traditionally been treated with deference, both by the courts and the general public. It was an office that, at least aspirationally if not in practice, tried to rise above politics.

Some legal scholars worry that the trend toward greater political polarization risks throwing all that away.

"My long-term concern is that the AGs become seen as one more lawyer, one more politician on the make, and that undercuts the credibility of the office itself," says Tierney, the lecturer at Harvard Law who served as Maine's AG from 1980 to 1990.

It's an impact that could reverberate beyond the AG's suite, implicating other political appointments to the office and perhaps coloring even the actions of the career employees who do most of a state AG's work. Any action an AG's office takes – whether it's ending a prosecution, bringing a civil lawsuit, or shifting an office's resources from, say, financial fraud to opioid deaths – could end up being cast as an inherently political act.

"I'm worried about the next level: when you get beyond the AG, to the solicitor general, and go down the ranks," Tierney says. "This is deadly, deadly serious."

Big Money, Bigger Office

There are still areas of agreement between the Democrats and Republicans serving as AG: Some 41 state attorneys general, for example, launched a joint investigation of pharmaceutical companies in September to learn more about what role the they may have played in contributing to the nation's opioid crisis.

"This has the potential to be, if not quite the same scope of the tobacco litigation of the late '90s, a big resolution a couple years from now. And that's being done very much on a bipartisan basis," Nolette, of Marquette, says.

What's more, while AGs are the most prominent members of their offices, the vast majority of employees who work there are civil servants, not political appointees.

"They come in every day, they do a hard job, they don't care who the president of the United States is. For 90 percent of them, there's probably no change," Tierney says.

Even the attorneys general themselves may not be as partisan as they seem: While there were 10 Republican AGs who sent a letter threatening to sue the Trump administration if it didn't end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, there were another 17 who chose not to sign on.

Yet there is broad concern that these areas of bipartisanship – or nonpartisanship – are swiftly becoming exceptions, tokens that illustrate just how partisan the office of state attorney general has become, especially amid the tide of money unleashed by the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010. That decision lifted limits on political spending by corporations and labor unions.

An investigation by The New York Times in 2014, for example, revealed how state AG investigations of companies such as 5-Hour Energy, T-Mobile and Bank of America were shut down, dismissed or minimized in the wake of lobbying efforts aimed directly at the office of state AG, and often channeled through groups like RAGA and DAGA. Oil companies and other energy firms were reportedly especially active in such efforts, heavily lobbying state AGs to oppose federal environmental regulations.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, for example, repeatedly sued the agency he now leads, as well as the Interior Department, while working as the Republican attorney general of Oklahoma. Pruitt at the time was serving as president of RAGA, and a New York Times investigation in 2014 revealed that many of the letters he sent to the EPA, Interior Department and White House were originally drafted by energy industry lobbyists.

"Unlike the governor, unlike other state level officials, AGs have an incredible amount of discretion to either bring litigation or shut down investigations, and may even in many states be exempt from public disclosure rules," Nolette says. "It raises these questions that, behind the scenes, there are all these conflicts of interest that fundamentally change the office from being focused on what it really should be focused on – public interest – to one that is focused on the interests lobbying them and giving them money."

Groups like DAGA and RAGA maintain that the deluge of money and growing partisanship are simply now part of the reality of U.S. politics, an environment that they may not like, but that they're forced to act in. How it affects the office of attorney general is beside the point – especially if it means a victory for the cause.

"This is the nature of our politics, and being elected officials themselves, AGs have to play a role, both in the political process, as well as being able to say, 'I'm taking care of the people in my state,'" Rankin says.

A New National Platform

If there's one thing that's clear about the office of state attorney general, its new visibility has transformed it into one of the most desirable political offices at any level. Under Trump in particular, it's become a way to appear on the national stage as a champion of the opposition to the current administration, and perhaps even a leader of the so-called "resistance."

Earlier this year, Rep. Xavier Becerra, D-Calif., agreed to leave the House – and a potential leadership post as the outgoing caucus chairman – to become California's new attorney general, a role that's given him at least as much time in the public eye as when he was holding national office.

"I don't need to be a member of Congress to fight and make sure our government is doing the right thing," he says.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's office, meanwhile, has arguably become the most visible and vocal AG's office to oppose the Trump administration – a result no doubt of the office's sprawling size and its location, but it's also not one known to be press-averse. Schneiderman so far has brought or joined more than a dozen lawsuits against the Trump administration on education, health care, environmental protections and immigration, including challenges to each of the three travel bans.

His office has also launched an inquiry of the Weinstein Company in response to a raft of sexual assault and sexual harassment allegations against its co-founder, Hollywood mogul and Democratic megadonor Harvey Weinstein.

But Schneiderman's lawsuits against the Trump administration may ultimately pale in comparison to his reported role in the Russia investigation.

Schneiderman's office is reportedly working with Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller to investigate Trump confidant and one-time campaign chairman Paul Manafort – a bid that could be aimed at spurring Manafort to cooperate with Mueller's team in its broader investigation of both Russian interference in the 2016 election and potential collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign team. Notably, while Trump would be able to pardon Manafort of any charges he'd face in the federal probe, the president wouldn't be able to do so for any state charges brought by Schneiderman's offices.

"Schneiderman could be playing one of the most significant roles in this entire story now," Shugerman, of Fordham Law, says. "Mueller is the most powerful force working against the Trump administration, but Mueller's power depends significantly on the assistance and cooperation of state prosecutors and state AGs."

It wouldn't be Schneiderman's first tangle with Trump. Last November, Schneiderman won a $25 million settlement ending a 3-year-old lawsuit that accused Trump University of defrauding students. In September, his office launched an investigation of Trump Foundation for making potentially unlawful campaign contributions and committing other financial improprieties.

Trump and his team have previously dismissed Schneiderman as a "hack" simply trying to take down a political enemy and make a name for himself. The attorney general has maintained that the investigations are not politically motivated. The fate of these conquests and others remain far from certain – and in the case of Russia, months if not years away.

Democratic AGs, in the meantime, have more recently faced some setbacks. A federal judge on Wednesday declined to block Trump's order to end certain Obamacare subsidies. And the Supreme Court this summer allowed parts of the administration's travel ban to take effect, signaling that the justices might be inclined to side with the Trump administration on the ban overall if and when the legal challenges eventually wind their way back to the court – a fate that seems all but inevitable. Indeed, with the Supreme Court firmly in conservative hands, it's far from clear how many of the Democratic AGs' wins in court will end up sticking.

For now, though, they've vowed to press on. On Thursday, they announced their latest lawsuit, an impending challenge by New York's Schneiderman against the EPA for failing to protect residents from smog pollution drifting across state lines.