Well, that right there may be the reason you've had difficulty findin' gainful employment. You see, in the mart of competitive commerce...
Ulysses Everett McGill, Oh Brother Where Art Thou?
I've probably started this thread three times and shelved it all three. It's too easy to misunderstand what its about.
As everyone now knows Donald Trump and his backers have filed a host of lawsuits all of which are biting the dust, as any legal observer would expect, at high speed. Such high speed, and so predictably, that there's a lot of speculation on exactly why he would do it. The common claim of just exhausting legal remedies is basically a dog that doesn't hunt unless the administration has a delusional mindset.
Indeed, at this point it's really hurting the GOP, which makes a person further wonder what exactly is wrong with the Republican leadership. It may be just flustered. It's was clear going into the election that the chances of Trump vacating the office were high, and the party did much better than it was possibly imagined that it would do. The Republicans have a chance to build on that but there's also a real chance that they're going to lash themselves to the Trump deck and look really bad. That would covert a chance to take back the House in 2022 to a chance to lose seats there and, moreover, it may well flip Georgia to the Democrats who, right now, are looking a bit better in that early campaign than the GOP is.
Beyond that, however, the damage that has been done and is being done to the profession of the law as a result of all of this is immeasurable. People assume something about the filing of lawsuits, if they aren't lawyers, which simply isn't true, that being that suits have merit simply because they are filed.
Now, most lawyers are careful about not filing meritless suits. But there are suits that are meritless or otherwise on the legal fringe. Because the American system highly values "access to courts" this is regarded by lawyers as just part of the price we pay so that everyone has access to the courts. But when suits become absurd and serve another purpose, that begins to really break down. The reason for this, long recognized in the law, is that average people take the "where there's smoke there's fire" approach to lawsuits. Something must be there, right, because it was filed.
Nope, that doesn't mean that at all.
Indeed, because that doesn't mean that, there are two tort actions, malicious prosecution and abuse of process, that are designed to be counter weapons for the wrongfully sued, and a Rule of Civil Procedure, Rule 11, that also seeks to address that. The problem here is that they're really hard to obtain any relief from, so people usually just are content with their victory, if they obtain it, and call it good. That doesn't stop all the back channel whispering that goes on after you've been sued, however.
As an example of this, I stumbled upon a post in a political blog where the author of the article, commenting on a lawsuit filed by Donald Trump regarding counting ballots in Pennsylvania, gushed on and on about how it was "brilliant" and how even Ruth Bader Ginsburg fault to be totally bowled over by the logic of the compliant.
What total bullshit. Truth be known the Judge assigned the case in Pennsylvania is likely to go through it like shit through a goose, and about as quickly. He or she probably already has.
Lawyers know that a complaint is the initiating document in a lawsuit. The plaintiff lines out his allegations and tries to put them in the framework of the law, and then asks for legal relief. In this situation, a "speaking complaint" was done, which is what lawyers occasionally do when they're writing their complaint for the press, rather than the court. Most complaints are pretty dry. In this one, when you get to the relief part, it looks like the scrivener plans on getting dumped by the Court, which is a logical presumption.
Quite a few of these suits are being filed and the result is that they're creating a delusion of probable legal success in certain demographics that desperately want to believe that there's something to them. Cold to them at first, the GOP has eventually sort of come around to them and is backing them in their statements. The local GOP has put up a couple of meme type things on their site, one of which says "We will win" (no, you won't) and another, bizarre one, which features a quote falsely attributed to Joseph Stalin to the effect that its not the number of votes cast, its who counts the votes that counts.
On that last one, Stalin never said that, but why anyone with any American political party, let alone the conservative party, would try to quote Stalin is totally beyond me. If Stalin had said such a thing it would have been because the result in the Soviet Union was foreordained and baloney. Arguing for that result is weirdly anti democratic.
Presumably what whoever put that up meant was that there were illegal votes that shouldn't be counted and the right folks will get to the bottom of it. And, as Republicans who lukewarmly endorses Trump's efforts last week noted, if there are illegal votes, they shouldn't be counted. The problem is that there's really no evidence whatsoever of illegal voting. Stories of illegal voting exist principally in isolated partisan groups that circulate them to themselves. This year, that's among disappointed Republicans. Earlier its been with disappointed Democrats.
I even saw a post this year that the courts are about to bust wide open a the conspiracy that Q has warned us about, and there was live feed on the news of voter fraud, and during the election the President and his staff were in a secure room in the White House watching it, which oddly was photographed and leaked to the public, and you could see the "Red Castle" in the background.
None of this is true. The courts aren't about to bust open some big conspiracy as there isn't one. There probably are some illegal or improper votes, and some of them will be Democratic and others Republican. There won't be many, however, and even the body in Trump's administration that oversaw the election pronounced it to be the most secure in the nation's history. It's another one of Trump's successes really, that his supporters should be proud of, and he should be too.
Okay, so what's the concern here? The courts will dump all these suits, nothing will go to the Supreme Court, and if it does, nothing will happen there. On January 20 Joe Biden will be sworn in as President, like it or not. No harm no foul, and the lawyers get to pick up some extra cash bucks in troubled times.
Well, that latter item is the problem.
Americans have a love hate relationship with lawyers already. They always have. But the reputations of American lawyers had sunk so low by the 1870s that the American Bar Association formed as a conservative, at that time, legal organization seeking to improve the standards of lawyers and raise their reputation in the public eye. A classic guild, it sought to impose standards on its own members.
Formed in 1878, the ABA was a huge success. By the first quarter of the 20th Century it had already succeeded in really reforming the American standards of practice. Highly conservative, it came ultimately to rate law schools and judicial applicants, and by the mid 20th Century most practicing American lawyers belonged to it.
That's no longer true.
It's no longer true in part because starting in the 1970s the same generation that argued in Taking Care Of Business that doing nothing all day was better than working (or at least being in a rock and roll band was) converted the law into a determined money making business. Prior to that it emphasized its role as a profession, and sort of a tweedy one that was somewhat relaxed. The generation that went into colleges and universities in the 1960s and came out in the 70s with a social justice mission welded that concept, self servingly, into one that emphasized money.
Now, in the US, you can sue anyone about anything. Everyone knows this. It isn't that you'll win, but you can do it. The goal isn't to get to court as a rule, it's to get a settlement.
Added to that, the Supreme Court in the 1970s struck down the provision that prohibited lawyers from advertising. Advertising doesn't have a dignity standard and not all lawyer advertising has been helpful to the image of the profession.
And even more, as the Boomer lawyers came up in the ABA, they converted it from a wall of conservative professionalism to an organization split so that its an activist organization in some quarters. Branches of the ABA has adopted progressive causes and essentially seek to back them through the courts.
The US isn't, contrary to what may be supposed, the most litigious nation in the world. But its population per capita of lawyers is the highest in the industrial world. It isn't the highest in the world, that would be Uruguay, but that's not an enviable comparison. The fact that we spend so much time suing each other isn't a really good look or a really good thing. Lawyers defend it as living in part of a free and fair society.
But when lawyers get around to attacking a free and fair election, the mask has really come off. Lawyers serving to advance an effort that they know is pointless at best or part of a tactical effort to do just what Donald Trump falsely or delusional asserts he's the victim of, election stealing, are really harming the nation.
Probably because of that, the lawyers from one of the suits, and indeed I think its the one I've referenced above, have withdrawn from the case. That is some of the lawyers from one of the firms have informed the court they aren't going forward in it. Rumors last week held that there was internal dissension in that firm, which hadn't been shy about unpopular causes in the past, about their representation here. They must have been, as they're now out.
And that's really to their credit.
What isn't to the profession's credit is backing this effort at all. There is no merit to the cases. It'll be interesting to see if any of the Judges sanctions anyone as a result of this. Probably not, but I'd guess it a remote possibility.
And in terms of things remote and near, this means that going into 2021 there are going to be a collection of individuals who will absolutely believe the election was stolen. Believing in a false narrative of defeat is extremely dangerous and usually destructive in the long run. American democracy will be damaged and, ironically, a real chance for the GOP to build a new conservative coalition, based on some of the populist ideas that Trump advanced, and some of the real conservative ideas that his administration advanced, and based on demographic trends just beginning to operate, may be lost.
Some predicted that the end of the Trump Presidency might be the end of the GOP. Ironically, the end of the Presidency proved not to be, but the Republicans might achieve that all on their own by advocating its own version of the Imperial Staff's 1918 "stabbed in the back" myth. At this moment, every tortured Republican and Independent who voted against Trump in the General election, and every conservative Democrat who returned back to the Democrats as they feared Trump, has had those fears vindicated. By looking back rather than forward, when they have a chance to do so, they may be destroying themselves. And by embracing a fantasy of false victory, they certainly are hurting themselves.
And lawyers at this point sort of jumped the shark. We won't be getting the reputation of the profession back. All of the noble claims that we've made about representing the downtrodden in desperate causes, etc., well. . . . they don't look too true either. When the scales came off, as they did about 1918, it's going to be obvious that just because a lawyer files something it doesn't mean anything, except perhaps about lawyers.
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