The lawfare has been going on for a while, but we are now starting to see some reality slap these hacks in the face. More slapping is coming. Welcome to the world of real law practice, resisters.
Understand that Twitter lawyers and MSNBC lawyers are all terrible. I mean, they are awful. Professionals laugh at them. They count on their titles and resumes to insulate them, and some of them are impressive – Laurence Tribe, for example, was a liberal but somewhat respected Harvard professor. Now, he shouts nonsense at passersby on Twitter all day. These people operate not in court but in their bizarro world, where insane legal theories get taken seriously.
You need to understand that the idiocy we see swirling around the attempts to frame and bankrupt Trump has zero to do with the kind of law normal lawyers practice every day. Except for political cases, where the normal rules often fail to apply – and when they do, the resistance gets pummeled – you do not get the “one weird trick,” too-clever by half kind of legal theories we see deployed against Trump. Weird stuff generally gets rejected and decisively. There’s generally one set of rules and people generally play by them – what non-lawyers hear about are the unusual cases where the rules get ignored. So, ideas like “Hey, this obscure sub-section of an amendment designed to exclude confederates can be used by one state to exclude the guy half of America wants to re-elect as president on the grounds that him not quickly enough tweeting for people to be peaceful is the same as the Civil War” rarely get raised because they always get laughed out of court. Or not laughed out – thrown out brutally when the judge gets mad about having his intelligence insulted.
But in political cases, politicized bodies like the Colorado Supreme Court accept legal nonsense (even there, only by one vote). And then it goes to the U.S. Supreme Court and suddenly, the judges are not playing by the new rules. They look at it as a legal matter – which the Twitter Perry Masons and MSNBC Clarence Darrows do not – and start asking perfectly predictable questions. Then you see the poor schlub stuck arguing for the nonsense theory, tapdancing and tugging his tie, trying to answer questions that never got asked in the echo chamber. After all, some questions are too hard to ask – they spoil a great theory. Trump is the worst monster there ever was, right? So, whatever has to be done to stop us from having to relive his nightmarish rampage of economic prosperity and peaceful security. If that means bending the law until it snaps, well, so be it. After all, Trump is a menace, and all six lawyers on set agree!
There’s your giveaway. If you get six lawyers agreeing on something, the fix is in.
That is why they are shocked when a court acts like a court, and suddenly, they need to answer tough questions about their theory. Why should one state, brd on its own criteria for what constitutes an “insurrection,” get to choose who can be president for all 50 states? What happens when another state decides that not enforcing the law on the border and allowing an invasion of third-world peasants constitutes an “insurrection” and knocks Senile Joe off the ballot? Why can’t it, and no, “But There Are Special Trump Rules” does not cut it. The Supreme Court has a bit of an ego – with some exceptions, it does not like to be made a fool of, and this ballot silliness is foolish. Some of the hardest questions came from the liberal justices. Look for an 8-1, maybe 9-0 rejection of this dumb scheme.
And you will see more with the criminal cases. There are potential avenues for appeal for the wacky rape case and the attack on Trump’s businesses. I am just hoping Trump’s lawyers, whose strategies I frequently do not understand, have preserved those issues for appeal (You have to raise issues in the trial court, or you waive them on appeal). The same goes for criminal cases. I think he has meritorious selective prosecution arguments, and again. I hope his lawyers are preserving those too (you would do that by making motions in the trial court, which I am unsure has happened yet).
The legal insufficiency of the cases is an issue. The Alvin Bragg case is just stupid -even honest leftists admit that. Fani Willis’s case is stupid too, and she might find herself in a cell for being corrupt. The Jack Smith DC trial is brd on unique legal theories that have never been tried before and that seem to contradict existing precedent. The Florida case got its feet kicked out from under it when the DOJ decided not to charge Biden for arguably worse acts than are alleged against Trump – though, of course, Trump can’t rely on the senility defense. All of these face severe questions when they get real judges looking at them – which might happen for some of them at the trial court level.
As for the resistance fantasy of Donald Trump spending the election campaign in successive courtrooms, do you think that’s going to end up happening? After waiting years to charge him, the government is now whining about Trump’s taking the necessary time to defend himself. We all know they timed these cases to happen in an election year, and so do the Supremes. Do you think anyone who is not a Dem appointee or named Roberts is going to shrug and go along with what everyone knows is happening? No, the federal cases, at least, will almost certainly not be heard in 2024, and unseemly haste by a judge to force them to trial before the election will not be appreciated.
These cases were always crap, and they relied on the cynicism of their proponents to maintain the fantasy that they are just law as usual. They are not, and everyone knows it – including the Supreme Court.