WASHINGTON — A series of court rulings favoring Republicans in their fight with the Obama administration over access to documents — rulings that the Trump administration unsuccessfully tried to get tossed out this year — could come back to haunt them as Democrats take control of the House of Representatives.

House Republicans spent years wrangling in court with former attorney general Eric Holder over a subpoena for Justice Department documents about a botched gun sting program known as Operation Fast and Furious. The Republicans scored key wins, with the judge rejecting the Obama administration’s argument that this was the sort of political dispute that shouldn’t be in court, and finding that the White House couldn’t make sweeping privilege claims to keep broad categories of documents out of Congress’s hands.

Assuming Democrats make good on their pledge to use their new majority status to launch investigations into Trump and his administration, à la what Republicans did during the Obama years, having these rulings on the books will be bad for the executive branch. Expect Democrats to cite them — and judges to seriously consider them — if the Trump administration tries to fight Democratic demands for information. They’ve already been cited in numerous law review articles.

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have a laundry list of investigations that Republicans have blocked them from pursuing so far. Over the past two years, Republicans have voted down Democratic requests for subpoenas on topics ranging from family separations at the border to the addition of a citizenship question on the 2020 census to Russian interference in the 2016 election.

In the months leading up to the midterm elections, the Trump administration tried to get two key rulings in the case stricken from the record. In March, the Justice Department announced a tentative settlement with House Republicans: The department would produce additional documents if the judge, US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, would agree to vacate her earlier decisions.

In a sharply worded opinion on Oct. 22, Jackson denied the request. Although the case is still pending — House Republicans appealed several rulings against them — there were few issues that hadn’t been resolved, she wrote.

“So there was little if anything to negotiate, and the only real change in circumstance since the filing of the appeal has been the change in political leadership at the Department of Justice in the wake of the Presidential election,” Jackson wrote. “This suggests that the primary, if not the sole, objective of the conditional settlement and the pending motion is to erase the Court’s prior rulings.”

As a district court judge, Jackson’s rulings aren’t binding on any judge who might end up with a future lawsuit between Democrats and the Trump administration on their docket. But as Jackson noted in last month’s opinion, judges find their colleagues’ opinions “helpful” when a difficult or novel case comes along. Jackson pointed out that when she ruled that House Republicans could sue the Obama administration, she cited a decision from a case dating back to the George W. Bush administration, finding it “persuasive and instructive.”

Tara Grove, a law professor at William & Mary Law School who has been following the Fast and Furious litigation, said she was surprised by the request to have the judge vacate the earlier orders, since they aren’t binding. Grove speculated that Republicans didn’t want Democrats to be able to point to such a recent example of Republicans making this sort of demand of the executive branch and then having at least some success in court.

“My assumption is that both sides assumed that the district court’s decision has some persuasive authority,” Grove said.

The case has been on hold since January 2017 as lawyers for the Justice Department and House Republicans negotiated a settlement. On Nov. 2, they filed papers saying that they were “discussing next steps” in light of Jackson’s ruling, “including whether to resume settlement negotiations.” They asked for another 30 days before filing another report on their status.

Once Democrats take control of the House next year, they’ll be able to dictate the future of the litigation — the House general counsel reports to House leadership.

House General Counsel Thomas Hungar and a Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment.