The attorney discipline system is the latest cudgel being used to suppress political dissent and opposition
Thanks to the Tennessee Star (here)!
I have written for years about how the Left has obtained control of the legal system—law schools, law firms, state bar associations, the ABA, legal scholarship, large swaths of the judiciary, and even the legal culture itself. This happened gradually over the course of decades as part of the Left’s “long march through the institutions.” Once the Left obtained control of the legal system, it was just a matter of time before it employed the law as a weapon—in pursuit of preserving and strengthening its political power. This is now happening at a rapidly-escalating pace. The Left seeks more than domination, more than hegemony. It seeks to vanquish the opposition—meaning Republicans and conservatives who comprise slightly more than half the nation’s voters.
I’ll get into the details shortly, but first an observation about human nature.
As English historian Lord Acton famously wrote in 1887, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Acton’s insight is that concentrations of power almost always lead to abuse—due to the foibles of human nature. This sentiment was shared by the Framers, who for that reason drafted the Constitution carefully to spread out the limited power of the federal government among three separate branches that serve as checks and balance against each other. Judicial activism—thanks to Biden and Obama, really judicial mutiny—is one of the most serious threats to our system of representative self-government.
The Left has captured America’s law schools, and effectively controls Big Law—the large law firms that exercise enormous influence in politics (through campaign contributions), policy (by providing lucrative sinecures to left-wing lawyers between Democrat administrations), and litigation (through the risibly-named “pro bono” work they sponsor on an epic scale). Most lawyers under the age of 40—especially if they attended an “elite” law school—have been indoctrinated into a leftist (or “woke”) worldview. As a consequence, the Left wields great power in the legal sphere. As Lord Acton taught, absolute power is invariably accompanied by corruption.
Lawyers (at least those in the top tier of their profession) are drawn to the “enforcer” role because they are the quintessential elites: highly-educated, egotistical, status conscious, comfortably affluent, and convinced that they are smarter than (and therefore better equipped to govern) the rest of the us, whom they regard as deplorables, rubes, bitter clingers, nativists, etc. Left-wing lawyers despise ordinary Americans, whom they regard as unenlightened. The Progressive Movement elevated “experts” into a mandarin class that believes it is superior to democracy of the masses. Many lawyers crave power (along with wealth) and will go to great lengths to acquire it. To Democrats, law is politics. Naturally, left-wing lawyers gladly lead the Massive Resistance to the MAGA agenda.
The abuses of the power acquired by the legal profession became especially visible in the Trump era. E.g., the unprecedented lawfare against President Trump, the corruption of election law under the pretense of Covid, the persecution of the J6 protesters, the disbarment of John Eastman for giving disfavored legal advice to President Trump, the pending bar disciplinary proceedings against Jeff Clark, Ed Martin, and other MAGA lawyers, and white-shoe law firms’ participation in frivolous “pro bono” litigation to frustrate the enforcement of federal immigration law. Left-wing lawyers have become a vital bloc of the Democratic Party and work ceaselessly to advance the Democrats’ far-left goals.
Two of the most influential Democratic operatives are lawyers: Marc Elias (who procured the bogus “Steele dossier” that led to the Russian collusion hoax, and was the architect of the fraudulent mail-in ballot and ballot-harvesting schemes that cost President Trump the 2020 election) and Norm Eisen, an ultra-partisan Washington insider and fierce opponent of President Trump who signed bar complaints against John Eastman and Jenna Ellis, and who co-founded one of the anti-Republican NGOs committed to kneecapping lawyers who work for conservatives causes.
Last week, a Rubicon was crossed. Dark-money-funded NGOs were behind the previous bar complaints—hard-left groups with high-minded names such as Lawyers Defending American Democracy, and States United Democracy Center (co-founded by Norm Eisen), while also including the nakedly-partisan The 65 Project, which is affiliated with the infamous attack dog David Brock. In an escalation of political theatre, last week a group risibly named Democracy Defenders Fund (founded and run by Norm Eisen), working with the left-wing Lawyers Defending American Democracy, orchestrated the filing of a 28-page ethics complaint with the Florida Bar by 128 former federal and state judges against Department of Homeland Security General Counsel James Percival. A group of former state and federal judges are serving as proxies for Norm Eisen’s campaign of “barfare” against conservative lawyers, giving a smashmouth power grab a patina of respectability.
Percival’s “ethical” lapse, warranting investigation and possible disciplinary action (up to and including disbarment)? Did he cheat clients, neglect his practice, or abuse drugs or alcohol? No. Percival had the temerity to publicly criticize four sitting federal district judges who flouted dispositive Supreme Court decisions, or unambiguous statutory language, or both, in immigration cases under the purview of the DHS. In other words, Percival, in his role as a member of the Trump administration, called out rogue judges for their insolent, contemptuous disregard of the law, in the form of controlling Supreme Court precedents. Percival, and the DHS, correctly insist that his criticism was appropriate because it was accurate and was based on facts. The DHS points out that “If accurately describing a judge’s rulings is controversial, the issue isn’t the reporting, it’s the rulings themselves. The record speaks for itself. Facts aren’t attacks.”
The ethical rule in question, Florida Rule of Professional Conduct 4-8.2(a) states that “[a] lawyer shall not make a statement that the lawyer knows to be false or with reckless disregard as to its truth or falsity concerning the qualifications or integrity of a judge.” Lawyers and citizens should be allowed to express criticisms of federal judges (or any judges, for that matter) on the same basis as any other government official. Federal judges have life tenure and do not stand for election. Criticism of their rulings should be fair game. The 128 former judges who signed the complaint against Percival are just partisan hacks circling the wagons in defense of rogue judges who defied the Supreme Court out of spite for President Trump. TDS on steroids.
The bar complaint—unlikely to result in the imposition of discipline against Percival–was made to embarrass Percival, hinder his post-Trump job prospects, generate headlines in the left-wing media, and to attempt to create a bogus narrative that President Trump is “intimidating” judges and threatening the independence of the judiciary. Even though Percival did nothing but highlight some rogue rulings by activist judges (in particular the refusal of district judges overseeing TPS cases to heed the Supreme Court’s emphatic decision in Mullin v. Doe), the 128 signatories to the bar complaint absurdly try to create the impression that Percival has jeopardized the safety of sitting federal judges.
This is rich, coming from Democrat apparatchiks who stood by silently when, in 2020, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer stood outside the Supreme Court and threatened the justices if they overturned Roe v. Wade (1973): “I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” Two years later, less than a month after the unprecedented leaking of Justice Alito’s draft decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overruled Roe, an armed gunman intent on murder was apprehended outside Justice Kavanaugh’s home, in the dark of night. The would-be assassin sought to prevent Dobbs from becoming final.
This was not an isolated act of physical intimidation aimed at the justices. After the Dobbs leak—which remains unsolved—a pro-abortion group disclosed the conservative justices’ home addresses, triggering noisy, illegal protests by left-wing activists outside the justices’ homes. Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, refuse to enforce federal laws prohibiting such displays intended to intimidate the justices. Recently, Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s home was “swatted”—i.e., an anonymous person falsely reported to the police that gunshots had been heard at Barrett’s address. As the Wall Street Journal observed, “The call was a fake emergency meant to send police to swarm the home of the Justice and her family.” This is borderline domestic terrorism.
Democrats uttered not one peep in protest to any of this, but now stage a phony hissy-fit over Percival’s publicizing of judicial foot-dragging, defiance, and impudence in order to delay President Trump’s withdrawal of TPS status for various Third World countries (including Somalia and Haiti) who have dumped hundreds of thousands of criminals and welfare cheaters into our country.
Posing as pearl-clutching guardians of judicial independence, these hypocrites supported the smearing of qualified judicial nominees purely on the basis of ideology (e.g., Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh), support calls to pack the Court solely for partisan reasons, approved the leaking of draft Supreme Court opinions, make spurious ethical charges against Supreme Court justices based solely on their ideological orientation, and disparage the integrity of the Supreme Court and question its legitimacy. Some in the newly-radicalized Democrat Party call for abolishing the Electoral College, the Senate, and even the Constitution itself. This is nothing short of an assault on our founding document’s structure and, indeed, on the rule of law and the institution of constitutional self-government.
Court-packing, a radical proposal that permanently—and justifiably—sullied FDR’s reputation, is now widely touted among Democrat presidential candidates. Attacking the independence of the Supreme Court, formerly a fringe position, is now commonplace. Suddenly, maintaining the nine-person size of the Supreme Court, the rule since 1869, has taken on a special urgency. As Jonathan Turley points out in his recent book, Rage and the Republic, a cadre of left-wing intellectuals, including some Ivy League law professors, insouciantly condemns the Constitution itself, along with the freedoms and tripartite federal structure it embodies, denouncing the document drafted in 1787 as “dangerous” and deriding those who support it as “slaves” and “cultists” engaged in “Constitution worship.” These critics favor untrammeled majority rule, which our Founders rightly regarded as “mobocracy.” Furious that an originalist Court is—at long last—rejecting decades of bogus “living Constitution” precedents, these nihilistic enemies of the Constitution advocate shredding two centuries of norms and traditions—including the independent role of the Supreme Court—in the pursuit of raw power.
The life-tenured Supreme Court, created by Article III of the Constitution, serves as an indispensable element of the separation of powers that keeps the other branches in check. In its insatiable quest for power, the Left aims to change that. Hypocritically, Norm Eisen’s flotilla of dark-money-funded NGOs pretend to cry crocodile tears because a government lawyer called attention to judicial insubordination. Their real goal is to silence dissent and stifle opposition within the legal system, revealing themselves to be power-hungry zealots–proving the wisdom of Acton’s dictum.
This orchestrated attack on Percival is unacceptable and extremely disturbing. What we are seeing is an unholy alliance—similar to the Military-Industrial Complex’s “iron triangle” that President Eisenhower warned about in his farewell address—between activist judges (current and retired), hyper-partisan lawyers, and left-wing bar functionaries who are willing to use the draconian mechanism of attorney discipline to retaliate against (or silence) Republican lawyers carrying out policies that a Republican President was elected to implement. Siccing the state bar on a lawyer for speech the Left finds uncongenial is raw censorship—the tactic of tyrants.
The bar complaint against James Percival represents a phalanx of Deep State actors trying to negate the 2024 election. Norm Eisen and his cabal of left-wing lawyers and former judges could be called the “swamp triangle” and their unholy alliance represents a grave threat to the republic. Call it the Legal Warfare Complex.
It is both shameful and ironic that groups calling themselves Democracy Defenders Fund, Lawyers Defending American Democracy, and States United Democracy Center are trying to prevent democracy from working. President Trump was duly elected and is enforcing laws passed by Congress, but the political losers, who have to resort to cheating and lawless activism, try to claim the moral high ground. This stunt illustrates why the Supreme Court must grant review to John Eastman’s disbarment and establish that lawyers have First Amendment protection for legal advice they give to clients, and public statements they make to inform the citizenry about chicanery and shenanigans being done behind the scenes by unelected politicians wearing black robes.
Otherwise, the Left’s coup d’etat through the Legal Warfare Complex will be complete.
Some conservatives commented on X:
“If bar associations want to wield the power of the state to protect their control over the guild, they must be subject to First Amendment guardrails. It’s hard to imagine how the First Amendment countenances government agencies punishing citizens for criticizing public officials.”
“Wow. 128 bipartisan former judges think criticizing judges for their rulings merits a bar complaint. This is a whole new level of “barfare”. Hard to believe more than 100 former judges think exercising First Amendment rights (no threats by Mr. @DHSGenCounsel) warrants this.”
From FL Gov. Ron DeSantis: “Lawfare. What a joke.”
The Shame of America’s Law Schools
What are some other examples of the legal system run amok? A recent news report shows how badly debased legal academia has become. The University of Pennsylvania is considered to be an Ivy League institution. Its law school has (or had) a well-deserved reputation for a top-quality legal instruction and scholarship. DEI, affirmative action, identity politics, and wokeness in general have devastated elite universities, and Penn is no exception. Recent news reports from Campus Reform and Legal Insurrection highlight how shabby the Ivy League has become.
Robert Saleem Holbrook is a lecturer at Penn’s law school. He teaches a class called “Community Lawyering to End Mass Incarceration” in Fall 2026. A 2021 description of the course claims that it will instruct students on “legal, political and advocacy strategies” for reforming the criminal justice system. Holbrook knows the issue well. He is the executive director of something called the Abolitionist Law Center, which seeks to abolish prisons (and, according to the group’s website, to “challenge every point on the criminal punishment conveyor belt including policing, courts, jails and prisons, and various forms of legal supervision, as well as other aspects of the carceral machine”).
Unlike some legal academics, Holbrook has personal experience with the subject he teaches. Holbrook is a convicted murderer who spent 27 years in Pennsylvania state prisons. According to Legal Insurrection,
Holbrook was sentenced to life without parole for his involvement in a home-invasion robbery as a 16-year-old that resulted in a woman’s murder…. Holbrook pled guilty and spent 27 years in prison before being resentenced in 2017 following litigation stemming from the U.S. Supreme Court’s Miller v. Alabama decision, which held that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juvenile homicide offenders were unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment….He argued that changes to the criminal justice system between the 1960s and 1990s are “racist and classist” and called life-without-parole sentences “unjust,” saying that such a sentence is a violation of “the constitutional rights of people convicted of felony murder and condemns them to die in prison.”
In addition to being an opponent of incarceration, Legal Insurrection reports, “Holbrook has also defended the actions of Hamas and Hezbollah, which have been classified as foreign terrorist organizations. In an Oct. 2023 X post, Holbrook wrote that ‘Hamas and Hezbollah have proven to be the most rational actors in the Middle East,’ adding, ‘That’s not fanaticism, it is strategy.’”
The incredible irony is that Penn provides a platform for a radical convicted murderer who spouts vile anti-Semitic rhetoric, but has exiled from its faculty a first-rate scholar, Amy Wax.
Wax is a polymath who graduated from both (Harvard) medical school and (Columbia) law school, and practiced as both a doctor and a lawyer. She argued 15 cases in the Supreme Court and was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford. She has tenure at Penn and held an endowed chair. She is widely-published. Back in the non-woke era, she would be a sought-after member of any decent law faculty. Instead, she is a pariah at Penn.
Wax’s fall from grace began when she co-authored an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2017 defending “bourgeois” values and lamenting the breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture. They pointed out that many contemporary problems–such as poverty, illegitimacy, and substance abuse–are symptoms of a larger phenomenon: Americans declining to honor time-tested cultural norms that were universally accepted (and usually followed) prior to the 1960s.
Graduating from high school, avoiding illegitimate children, being employed, obeying the law, and exhibiting self-discipline represent a path out of poverty. This is simple common sense, but in the Fever Swamp to today’s legal academy, it was treated as heresy. The Left insists that society (racism, patriarchy, capitalism, inequality, western culture, et.) is responsible for all problems. Wax was condemned for expressing a point of view that was allegedly racist, white supremacist, hate speech, etc.–a nonsensical charge. Students demanded that she be removed from the classroom. Thirty-three of Wax’s colleagues–half of the entire Penn law faculty!–signed an open letter categorically rejecting her views. Wax wrote an article in Imprimis about the kerfuffle, titled “Are We Free to Discuss America’s Real Problems?” In the Ivy League, the answer is no.
Things only got worse when Wax discussed the reality of affirmative action: few blacks admitted to elite schools such as Penn Law are able to compete successfully with peers selected through merit. Many drop out and those that graduate generally perform in the bottom half of their class. For telling the truth she was stripped of teaching first year courses (over which students have no choice). According to Wikipedia, “In September 2024, the University of Pennsylvania suspended Wax for one year at half pay, and removed her named chair. In addition to a public reprimand, the university required that Wax must henceforth state that she ‘is not speaking for or as a member of the Penn Carey Law School or Penn’ at public appearances. She retained her tenure.”
Wax is challenging these punitive actions in court, but even if she succeeds, she will be an outcast with her students, faculty peers, and dean. An outspoken conservative is not welcome in an elite law school. Wax is far from the only example of the Left’s intolerance of dissent from liberal orthodoxy.
But convicted murderers can lecture at Penn about how to abolish prisons!
President Trump Takes on the ABA, Which has Monopoly Control of Law School Accreditation
The American Bar Association does not license or discipline lawyers. It is, however, an influential and well-funded trade association for lawyers and legal professionals. The ABA, once a mainstream voice for the legal profession—and even a conservative force during the New Deal—is now very woke, and has been for decades. The policy positions of the ABA are indistinguishable from those of the ACLU or SPLC. It is a left-wing activist group that—before getting booted out of the judicial nomination process—routinely rated conservative nominees “not qualified” and rubber-stamped leftist candidates no matter how radical.
Republicans in charge of the Senate Judiciary Committee caught on to this and canned the ABA as a partisan body undeserving for a role in rating judicial candidates. The ABA continues to advocate policy positions, and one of its most significant examples of its remaining influence is that—owing to its once-respectable reputation—it serves as the accrediting organization for America’s 200 or so law schools. For purposes of determining eligibility of graduates to take the bar exam, the accrediting authority is conferred by the state supreme courts in each of the 50 states (almost all of which rely on the ABA to determine accreditation). For purposes of determining eligibility to borrow federal student loans to attend law school, the accrediting authority is conferred by the U.S. Department of Education.
Accreditation is vital to a law school’s ability to operate. No one would study for three years if they would be ineligible to take the bar exam (because their school is not accredited), and few students would be able to attend law school (with its astronomical tuition) if they were ineligible for federal student loans.
Last week, President Trump’s DOE took what the WSJ described as
the first step toward removing the ABA’s authority to accredit law schools, said David Barker, assistant secretary of education…. The recommendation to reject the ABA is accompanied by a nearly 500-page Education Department report, more than a year in the making. It asserts that the ABA’s accreditation wing isn’t sufficiently independent of its profession. That independence is designed to ensure the accreditor focuses on education quality.
“We have said many times that accreditation, in general, operates like a cartel,” Barker said. “When there’s no competition, accreditors feel free to inject their own political preferences, their own ideologies into the work that they do.”…
Any final decision to reject the ABA is two steps and several months away; the outcome isn’t certain. The Education Department’s initial recommendation goes next to a panel that reviews accreditors, which then makes a recommendation to Undersecretary of Education Nicholas Kent.
If the ABA did lose its accrediting power, law schools affiliated with a university would likely just use the university’s accreditor instead. Unaffiliated law schools would need to find a new accreditor.
The accreditation salvo brings together two Trump targets: the ABA and higher education.
Conservatives have long accused the ABA of having a liberal bias, but tensions have grown under Trump administration efforts to curb the organization’s influence. The Labor Department and Federal Trade Commission said they wouldn’t support their lawyers attending ABA events. Conservative groups and Republican-led states have targeted the organization over diversity initiatives and power to accredit law schools. The FTC has said the ABA’s power represents anticompetitive behavior.
The ABA requires law schools to grant racial preferences to meet quotas in admissions, skews internal governance in favor of the faculty, demands DEI/social justice/wokeness in the curriculum to require indoctrination, micromanages the clinical programs offered to produce graduates trained in activism, and generally uses the accreditation power to force law schools to function as social justice academies.
The Federalist had a more polemical take:
The Trump administration announced Friday it is moving forward with dismantling the American Bar Association’s (ABA) stranglehold on U.S. law schools, which allowed the organization to force left-wing ideologies on legal education at the threat of revoking accreditation.
Department of Education staff recommended that the ABA lose its status as the only officially recognized accreditor of American law schools, starting a process that will send the recommendation to the Department of Education’s National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI), and then to Undersecretary of Education Nicholas Kent for review….
The Education Department’s Friday move is a new line of attack against the ABA, but the official said that loss of the ABA as an accreditor would likely still open the door for a university’s law school to be accredited under the umbrella of the full university’s accreditation, if it is affiliated. Law schools not affiliated with a larger university rely on accreditation to be eligible for federal student loans….
“The American Bar Association has abused its role as the nation’s main law school accreditor to push leftist ideology in the legal profession,” Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, said on social media. “The ABA lost its credibility long ago. Now it will finally face the repercussions of prioritizing political agendas over the law.”
In any event, the Trump administration’s action is sound and long overdue. Eliminating the accreditation monopoly of the ABA will help fix legal education, but much reform will be necessary to clean out the Augean stable of legal academia.