Michael S. Schmidt, Matthew Goldstein, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, and Ben Protess have the story, How a Major Democratic Law Firm Ended Up Bowing to Trump, though why the New York Times needed four of its top journalists to “explain” why it took the 200-partner, $2 billion law firm known as “Paul Weiss” no more than two seconds to decide it was ankle grabbin’ time for the firm in the face of blatantly unconstitutional threats from Cap’n Orange Hair is a bit of a mystery to me. Well, no one ever accused lawyers of being “brave”.
One fairly brave attorney is Sabrina Haake, writing in her blog The Haake Take, who tells us John Roberts has created a monster — and he knows it. Haake says that, based on her more than thirty years of experience
members of the federal trial bar do not toy with federal judges without real fear. They do not get smart, evasive, or argumentative. Any question the judge deems relevant, you answer, whether you agree it’s relevant or not. To prepare for hearings- all hearings, any hearing you need to win- you try to anticipate questions the judge might ask, and if you don’t know the answer, you find out. If he asks an unexpected question you can’t answer, you respond with what you know, and you make very, very clear why you don’t know what you don’t know.
Unless they work for Donald Trump, of course. Then they are free to decline to answer whenever they feel like it, “explaining” to the judge that they take orders from the president of the United States, not some nobody in a robe, and that, in effect, federal judges have no jurisdiction over His Highness. As Haake points out, it was Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’ abysmal decision in Trump v. United States that “justifies” his minions’ outrageous claims of “absolute immunity” from the federal court system for Donaldo. Haake urges the victims of Trump’s corrupt wrath to bring claims in state court that, she believes, could force Roberts to explain away his earlier lies and somehow limit Trump’s absolute lawlessness.
Well, one can always hope, but Haake herself isn’t all that hopeful:
Trump, who is clearly planning to stay in office past his expiration date, will likely disregard that opinion as well, but at least the nation will understand Trump’s lawlessness in plainer terms.
Of course, there may not be any attorneys left to bring the suits that Haake imagines. Ali Bianco, writing for Politico, informs us of yet another development in Trump’s “the first thing, let’s kill all the lawyers” campaign, issuing a “memo” to the attorney general and the secretary for homeland security demanding a crackdown on “unethical conduct” in the legal system, aka “doing things that make Donald Trump mad”. So when I said, as I did say earlier, that, thanks to John Roberts, Donald Trump had destroyed the Constitution, I didn’t realize that that was only the beginning. Trump’s going to destroy our entire legal system as well. Nice work, John, you Catholic schoolboy you! I wonder how many Hail Marys this one is going to cost you! A google?
