My best friend growing up was the daughter of an attorney who was the co-founder of a law firm which is still one of the most aggressive and successful law firms in Washington, D.C. My friend, her name was Judy, also wanted to be a lawyer when she grew up but decided she wanted public service rather than corporate law, so she ended up as a staff attorney for the FTC.
I happened to spend some time with her several months after Reagan was inaugurated and I asked her if her job was secure, given that Reagan was always going on about how he wanted to reduce the size of the government, even though under his tenure the number of people working for Uncle Sam actually increased.
“Of course my job’s secure,” Judy said to me. “I’m a lawyer and lawyers run the government. After all, it’s a government of laws, right?”
Every four years we have a national election and every four years the GOP always pushes the same nonsense about how government, or at least the federal government, is no good. The last GOP Presidential candidate pushed this argument to its limits by endlessly accusing some unnamed, government bureaucrats inhabiting something called the Deep State with wielding too much unchecked authority which let them ‘rig’ the election against him.
Meanwhile, in order to promote this cockeyed ‘election fraud’ theory, Trump hired a bunch of lawyers to push his claim through the courts and challenge the illegal doings of the Deep State.
And which lawyers did Trump hire? The biggest bunch of liars, fools, and scumbags to ever get licensed to practice law in any state.
At least before he became a total and complete drunk, Rudy Giuliani had actually done important legal work as a federal prosecutor in New York. But where did Trump dig up Jay Sekulow, who’s chief legal experience seems to be a right-wing radio show he runs that is Pat Robertson’s answer to the ACLU. Which barrel bottom did he scrape to find Sidney Powell, who has been accused by multiple state bar associations of lying under oath?
Then there’s John Eastman, founder of something called the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, who is such an expert on Constitutional law that even non-lawyers on the White House staff knew that his argument about how Mike Pence could dump the original electoral votes in the garbage was totally and completely full of sh*t.
But the best one of all is a lawyer named Stefan Passantino, who told Cassidy Hutchinson to lie to the Select Committee when she testified about the events leading up to January 6th. And this guy, believe it or not, actually held the position of Chief Ethics Attorney at the White House! To their credit, when this story broke, the partners at the law firm where Passantino was most recently hanging his hat told him to f*ck off and get lost.
What did Trump do to hire this bunch of what Grandpa would call this legal ‘drek’ (read: garbage?) Run ads which said he was looking for lawyers who could advise him how to break the law?
Right now, there are 193 countries in the U.N. and most of these places have governments whose operations don’t rely on any laws at all. Or if these countries do have laws, the laws are simply disregarded when it suits the political leaders to do whatever they want to do.
According to the Democracy Index, there are only 21 full democracies in the world, as opposed to 59 authoritarian regimes, with all the other countries somewhere in between.
Believe it or not, the United States didn’t make the list of full democracies in 2021 because of the rhetorical threats by Trump’s election ‘fraud’ gang, along with the Capitol riot on January 6th. I have to assume Trump simply doesn’t understand what the word ‘law’ actually means. Given the fact that his three personal attorneys – Cohn, Cohen, Giuliani – have all been disbarred, his lack of knowledge about the law isn’t all that hard to believe.
Believe it or not, I’m not so crazy about Trump getting indicted, convicted, and going to jail. What will I write about if he’s sitting in Butner or Otisville without access to a social media machine?