After President Trump lost the 2020 election, his allies thought about what to do differently if he returned to power. One lesson from his first term, they decided, was that government lawyers, even very conservative Republican political appointees, had frequently raised legal objections to ideas he or his White House advisers put forward.
If they got another shot, they said in campaign-era interviews, they would install much more permissive gatekeepers. Now, a month into a term that has been defined by Mr. Trump’s radical challenges to the basic structure of government, his administration is moving aggressively to curb a critical internal check: independent legal thinking.
His appointees have swiftly cleared the Justice Department’s top ranks of career lawyers, even as Mr. Trump stocked leading posts with his own defense attorneys. His aides sidelined the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, bypassing its traditional role of vetting draft executive orders and giving it no acting chief. Last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi added to the purge by firing the top lawyer at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The rapid dismissal of independent lawyers across the government evokes a line from Shakespeare, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Some, like Justice John Paul Stevens in a 1985 opinion, have interpreted it to mean that “disposing of lawyers is a step in the direction of a totalitarian form of government.”
Posted by John3262005
2 Comments
> Area Rapist Hates It When People Say No
I don’t think this is good.
Some might argue it’s bad.
But one thing’s certain:
Joe Biden is old.