Letter From Washington

The Sheepdogs Are Leaving the Field

Hello from Union Station on this cold spring day in DC. Blossoms are out. The Capitol dome rises a few hundred yards away. The “city of magnificent distances,” as a 19th-century Portuguese minister once called Washington, is as elegant as ever. But all is not well.

I started out covering politics in the nation’s heartland: Springfield, Illinois. I was schooled under that smaller Capitol dome, not far from where Lincoln once practiced law, in the varieties of democratic compromise and the inexorable pull of public corruption. Almost all the governors of the state of Illinois during my years there ultimately wore the prison stripes – including, most recently, the man with the great hair, Rod Blagojevich.

One of the first lessons I learned at Springfield was the old saw about how the ingredients of lawmaking, like sausage, are not pretty to look at. Still, things got done. Sometimes, the things seemed unfair and regressive. Sometimes they were good things, improving lives, maybe righting wrongs. Whichever way things went, the framework of the law was not perfect, but it felt solid. And the public lawbreakers with hands in the treasury or holding out the bribe bag still had to watch their backs.

Now, on this cold spring day in Washington, less than a hundred days into MAGA’s second term, that framework feels very, very shaky indeed.

The governors of Illinois went to prison one after another because the justice system – in most cases, the dreaded feds – had eyes on them as they grifted and grafted. I’m pretty sure they all would have liked to say the law was “weaponized” against them. But juries of their peers found the facts at odds with that assessment – including in the corruption case against Blagojevich, AKA Blago, that Trump erased with a pardon a few months ago.

The pardon of felonious Blago, like almost everything felon Trump does, was, first of all, a thumbing of the nose at the people who uphold norms and the structure of the law. For a man who claims to love cops and offshore slave prisons for the (never even charged with a crime) “alien enemies” among us, and who can’t wait to invoke the Insurrection Act to sic the military on dissidents, he sure hates the law.

MAGA voters empowered this man to wreak his vengeance, and he is peculiarly fit for the task. He doesn’t seem to know how to read three sentences into a law book, but he’s probably put in as many hours in consultations with lawyers as he has doing anything (other than playing golf).

He has a knack for finding lawyers to manipulate the law as a delay-delay-delay defendant, and to weaponize it (yes, it was projection) as a plaintiff. Now, he’s been empowered to systematically break the system.

Of all the unlawful activities we’ve witnessed since the inauguration, the one that chills to the bone is the plucking of un-charged mostly Hispanic, Muslim, or otherwise non-white people off the streets or from inside their homes and “disappearing” them into the tropical dungeon of El Salvador or the for-profit Louisiana prison network, our own swamp gulag.

The Supreme Court just “stayed” a lower court order demanding that these extralegal kidnappings be reversed. As Liz Dye explains in Public Notice, while the ruling is not permanent, it is an ominous signal, a feint to procedural bullshit, suggesting that the justices are ready to bail on due process rather than set up a crisis situation where the fake businessman they basically “kinged” with unlimited immunity last year just ignores them.

The day after that order, Trump’s Olympic Gold medal level lie spewer of a spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, confirmed that her boss had been musing about a point in the perhaps near future when he might be able to deport not just “aliens” but American citizens.

So sure is Trump of his omnipotence over the rule of law that he has hung his Georgia felony charges mug shot as his official portrait in the Department of Justice. He put his personal attorney, Todd Blanche (who lost the Stormy Daniels hush money case), in charge as DOJ deputy, and appointed anti-abortion MAGA fanatic Ed Martin* in the critical post of U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.

Blanche already won some DOJ toady chest ribbons by dispatching armed marshals to the home of a (female) Justice Department attorney the Trump clan fired over her refusal to restore gun rights to the actor Mel Gibson, who lost that right after a 2011 domestic violence conviction. The marshals were called off only because attorney Liz Oyer heard they were on their way and accepted the order by email.

So much plotting, so much lawbreaking, in so little time.

For the last few weeks, Trump’s minions have been drawing up executive orders aiming to restrict law firms that have ever worked for political opponents, individual and organizational, NGOs, nonprofits, or have employed lawyers who worked on any of the criminal and civil cases against Trump. Since Trump has spent most of his life fighting lawyers with other lawyers, the list is long.

Trump only skated away from the various cases against him in the year before the election by manipulating the courts with incessant delays and Hail Mary legal arguments, one after another. Trump’s orders bar targeted firms from federal contracts, strip their lawyers of security clearances, and – outrageously – prevent them from entering federal courthouses. "It sends little chills down my spine," U.S. Judge Beryl Howell said, to hear the government argue that such orders are lawful if the president thinks the firm’s cases aren't in the nation's interest.

Howell and other federal judges have “temporarily restrained” most of Trump's executive orders against the firms that fought back. But incredibly, a number of the nation’s largest, richest, and most powerful firms - “Biglaw” in the industry parlance - took a knee and negotiated themselves out of danger for now - by offering millions of dollars of hours of “pro bono” legal work for Trump’s pet legal projects.

Now the legal community, rather than standing united against these diabolical and patently illegal orders, are cutting deals individually, basically prostituting their lawyers to service the vengeful oaf with countless hours of legal harassment. "They're just saying, 'Where do I sign? Where do I sign?'" Trump bragged after the first ones broke without a fight.

Every American lawyer has taken an oath to uphold the law, both state and federal. What about the Constitution? What about that oath?

The bitter old man counts on one principle above all others in his relationships with everyone, from his wife and children to his political friends and foes: everyone has a price. And here, he didn’t even have to pay them, just threaten their income. They couldn’t bear to lose a few clients while they fought for their rights in court. “They’re zillion-dollar law firms, and ‘money, money, money’ is all that motivates them,” Bernie Sanders said in an interview on CBS News Sunday Morning. “So they’re going to sell out their souls to be able to make money here in Washington.”

The sheepdogs are leaving the field.

*Fun Fact About Ed Martin: He is the author of an absolutely insane “COVFEFE: Patriot or Traitor” adult coloring book available on Amazon.