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Nebraska's attorney general to Trump's crowd: we sued Biden, California and New York, and won

Photo: Matt Johnson from Omaha, Nebraska, United States / CC BY 2.0 (source)

Nebraska AG Hilgers Reads Trump’s Grand Island Crowd a Scoreboard of Wins Over Biden, California and New York

by
M.A. Rothman

By M.A. RothmanOctober 6, 2026 · 4 min read
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Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers took the stage at President Trump’s rally in Grand Island on Monday, Oct. 5, and instead of a standard stump speech, he read the crowd a scoreboard. One after another, he listed the lawsuits Nebraska has pressed against the Biden administration, California and New York, and the same punchline each time: we sued, and we won.

Speaking ahead of the president, Hilgers framed his case around one idea. “This country was based on our constitutional principles where we elect and vote for the people in government,” he said, “not California regulators, not Washington bureaucrats, and not New York lawmakers.”

The scoreboard

Hilgers began with Washington. “When President Biden was in office, he didn’t have Congress try to shut down our coal-fired power plants. He had the EPA, unregulated, unvoted for bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., try to shut down our power plants here in Nebraska. We sued him, and we won.”

Then schools. “And when President Biden decided that he wanted to force public schools, like those right here in Grand Island, to force them to have boys play in girls’ sports, you know what? We sued him again, and we won that time, too.”

Then student loans. When Biden decided he would spend “a half a trillion dollars without a vote of Congress during an inflationary period,” Hilgers said, the case went to the Supreme Court, “and guess what? We won then, too.”

Then the coasts. California, he said, passed a regulation that “would have forced Nebraska trucking companies to abandon diesel-based fleets for electric semi-trucks.” And New York decided to “tax oil and gas companies upwards of $100 billion,” he said. “We went and sued them in New York, and we beat them.”

What the record shows

The court record backs up the big wins.

  • Student debt. In Biden v. Nebraska, decided June 30, 2023, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the education secretary lacked authority under the HEROES Act to cancel roughly $430 billion in student loan principal. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion.
  • Title IX. Nebraska was one of six states that sued over the Biden administration’s 2024 Title IX rule. In July 2024, a federal court in the Eastern District of Missouri issued a preliminary injunction blocking the rule in Arkansas v. U.S. Department of Education. Hilgers called the ruling “a win for girls and women.”
  • California’s electric-truck mandate. Nebraska led a multistate coalition, joined by the Nebraska Trucking Association, against California’s Advanced Clean Fleets rule. In a May 2025 settlement, California agreed not to enforce the rule and to repeal it, and conceded it cannot enforce its 2036 ban on sales of combustion-engine trucks without a federal waiver. Hilgers called it “a huge win for everyone in Nebraska.”
  • New York’s climate superfund. On Aug. 31, 2026, Chief Judge Brenda Sannes of the Northern District of New York ruled for the challengers in West Virginia v. James, a multistate suit Nebraska joined, against New York’s Climate Change Superfund Act. Hilgers’ office said the law aimed to impose $75 billion in fines on energy producers for past, lawful energy production, a smaller figure than the one he used on stage.

The power plant fight is the hardest to pin down. Hilgers did not name the case on stage, and his office’s announcements of courtroom wins on climate rules include a 2024 ruling that struck down a Biden highway rule requiring states to set greenhouse gas targets for vehicles on their roads.

The bigger point

Hilgers made the argument that ties these cases together. “Since President Trump has been elected president, we don’t have a lot of problems with federal bureaucrats trying to tell Nebraskans what to do,” he said. “But power has gone to unregulated bureaucrats in other states.”

That is the real story of the last several years of state litigation. When Washington could not pass a policy through Congress, it tried to impose it by regulation. And coastal states have tried to impose their own policies on everyone else, through truck rules that would have hit Nebraska fleets and climate penalties aimed at energy producers far outside New York. In case after case, states like Nebraska used the courts to insist that the people who make the rules must answer to the voters who live under them.

Hilgers closed with a direct appeal. “In November, I’m asking you to vote with me. Vote for the Republican Party,” he said, naming Sen. Pete Ricketts, Gov. Jim Pillen and “Congressman Smith” and urging the crowd to “vote up and down the ticket to keep Nebraska great.” He also spoke of the lawyers in his office who, as he put it, “get up and eat glass, and all they do is fight for you and for the Constitution.”

Nebraska did not vote for California’s truck rules or New York’s climate tax, and Mike Hilgers helped make sure it never had to live under them.

Sources

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