The expeditious descent of the United States into a place ruled by fascist authoritarianism is a dark time to deal with. The woes of an upper middle class white lawyer who owns and controls his own law firm pale in comparison to the way this is impacting so many folks.
But it is definitely making me a bad blogger. It’s been almost exactly three months since I have posted anything here. It is not for a lack of things to say, nor a fear of some sort of reprisal for saying things.
No, it stems from a combination of feelings and emotions that surely the German language has a great word for. Despair, frustration, pointlessness, outrage, disbelief, and more.
I mean how many times do I want, or do you want to read, me lamenting just how badly the rule of law in this country is being destroyed? We continue to have an United States Attorney General who openly declares that the mission of the Department of Justice is to advance the President’s agenda and those unwilling to do that will be fired. How many more times do I have to write about how wrong that is?
Within the last week, we’ve learned that our military simply murdered 11 people in a boat based on a claim that they were involved in drug smuggling. It’s a blatant violation of international law. But no one is in a position to do anything about it, and it barely merits discussion in the corporate media which has bent their knees so severely in obeisance to Trump that they likely have no meniscus left. In fact, as if that situation wasn’t a bad enough signal, within days the regime has decided to rebrand the Department of Defense into the Department of War, with an alcoholic former Fox News host using the occasion to apparently freestyle rhyme “lethality” and “legality” in a way that denigrates compliance with the law.
How many times am I supposed to write about it how problematic it is that we have lawyers so willingly assisting Trump in defending these various acts of a dictator, including the continued efforts at defending what amounts to nothing more than human trafficking in connection with the attacks on immigrants who have come to our country in full compliance with the legal procedures in place at the time?
In my own home state, there are attorneys who continue to advocate in the criminal case against Kilmar Abrego Garcia when they have to know full well that it was brought in bad faith by the Trump administration to punish that man for being an early “face” of the sheer apathy of the administration to who they wronged. And, even worse than the fact that they have not either dismissed those charges or resigned, they now appear to be engaging in efforts to coerce him into pleading guilty by leveraging the willingness of our government to send him to Africa, a place he did not come from and has never lived.
And how many more times do I need to try to shame organized bar associations into standing up for the rule of law and against all this? The TBA still stands silent, and essentially useless if not actually complicit, in deciding it does not want to stand up for the rule of law in the face of an aspirational dictatorship? I have done what I could by publicly resigning from the TBA and urging others to do the same. How many more times do I have to do that before it might move the needle?
As to all of that, I don’t know how many more times, but I guess this was one.
And, meanwhile, there are lots of other much less important things that I could write about, but it always feels like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic when I think about putting up a post about something with such comparatively low stakes.
(Nonetheless, today’s other post will do so.)