In the runup to Thanksgiving, three Never-Trump lawyers masquerading as conservatives ran to the pages of — where else? — the far-left New York Times.
They headlined:
The Trump Threat Is Growing. Lawyers Must Rise to Meet This Moment.
Writers George Conway, J. Michael Luttig, and Barbara Comstock are described as follows in the Times:
The writers are lawyers. Mr. Conway was in private practice. Mr. Luttig was a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit from 1991 to 2006. Ms. Comstock represented Virginia’s 10th District in Congress from 2015 to 2019. They serve on the board of the newly formed Society for the Rule of Law Institute.
Among other things, these three say this:
American democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law are the righteous causes of our times, and the nation’s legal profession is obligated to support them. But with the acquiescence of the larger conservative legal movement, these pillars of our system of governance are increasingly in peril. The dangers will only grow should Donald Trump be returned to the White House next November.
Recent reporting about plans for a second Trump presidency are frightening. He would stock his administration with partisan loyalists committed to fast-tracking his agenda and sidestepping — if not circumventing altogether — existing laws and long-established legal norms. This would include appointing to high public office political appointees to rubber-stamp his plans to investigate and exact retribution against his political opponents; make federal public servants removable at will by the president himself; and invoke special powers to take unilateral action on First Amendment-protected activities, criminal justice, elections, immigration and more.
The three are now-former members of the mainstream conservative and quite sensible Federalist Society. Among other things, they say:
[T]he legal landscape has deteriorated to a degree we failed to imagine, with Mr. Trump and his allies explicitly threatening to upend fundamental tenets of the American constitutional system if returned to power.
Where to begin with this dangerous and decidedly unconstitutional nonsense motivated by a hatred for both the Constitution and a president who scrupulously followed its principles in battling the decidedly dark corners of the Washington, D.C., swamp?
To start, they say this:
[A reelected President Trump] would stock his administration with partisan loyalists.
Nooooo kidding? There has never been a president in all of American history who did not stock his administration with like-minded “partisan loyalists.” Have these people never heard of, to pick at random, FDR and his New Dealers? JFK and his “Irish Mafia”? Abraham Lincoln and his famously powerful staffers John Hay and John Nicolay? Or Ronald Reagan and his Mike Deaver? Jimmy Carter and Georgia allies Hamilton Jordan and Jody Powell? Barack Obama and David Axelrod? (READ MORE from Jeffrey Lord: A New York Times Columnist Has TDS)
The hard historical fact of life is that every president has the constitutional right to appoint what these Never Trumpers are now suddenly labeling as:
partisan loyalists committed to fast-tracking his agenda.
Then they are horrified that a reelected President Trump would actually, like every other president, be:
appointing to high public office political appointees to rubber-stamp his plans to investigate and exact retribution against his political opponents.
You mean like Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland? Their handpicked investigator and Department of Justice “special counsel” Jack Smith?
What is perfectly obvious here is that these three lawyers, obsessed with Trump and his vow to clean up the Swamp, are terrified of a genuine restoration of constitutional practice to the federal government.
They have made plain with this piece, as if we didn’t already know, that they are platinum members of the D.C. Swamp’s “old boy and old girl” network.
They know full well that nowhere in the Constitution do unelected federal employees have the right to run the federal government as they wish. They, per the Constitution, work for an elected president of the United States — and yes, they carry out that president’s policies. And if they don’t like those policies — they can quit and move on.
It has been a serious mistake to give these people a permanent and untouchable status inside the federal bureaucracy. Doing so has produced stories like this one that appeared in the Washington Post on Jan. 31, 2017, a mere 11 days after Trump was sworn into his first term. The Post headlined:
Resistance from within: Federal workers push back against Trump
The story reported:
The signs of popular dissent from President Trump’s opening volley of actions have been plain to see on the nation’s streets, at airports in the aftermath of his refugee and visa ban, and in the blizzard of outrage on social media. But there’s another level of resistance to the new president that is less visible and potentially more troublesome to the administration: a growing wave of opposition from the federal workers charged with implementing any new president’s agenda.
Less than two weeks into Trump’s administration, federal workers are in regular consultation with recently departed Obama-era political appointees about what they can do to push back against the new president’s initiatives. Some federal employees have set up social media accounts to anonymously leak word of changes that Trump appointees are trying to make.
And a few government workers are pushing back more openly, incurring the wrath of a White House that, as press secretary Sean Spicer said this week about dissenters at the State Department, sends a clear message that they “should either get with the program, or they can go.”
There was no objection when the president was named Obama — and was using his phone and pen to direct these federal employees to carry out his agenda. But when some current federal employees object to President Joe Biden’s agenda, liberals are horrified.
The bottom line here is simple. Though these New York Times guest writers once may have been conservatives, lawyers Luttig, Conway, and Comstock have long since left the fold. They have made it clear that they oppose the return of the conservative president who appointed Supreme Court justices to overturn the decidedly unconstitutional Roe v. Wade. They oppose that former president’s free-market tax cuts and pro-capitalism policies. They oppose his making sure that unelected federal employees carry out a president’s agenda — or be fired.
And, most tellingly, they support Biden using the legal apparatus of the federal government to, in the style of a third-world banana republic, prosecute and try to jail a political opponent.
In short, this latter policy is not even close to conservatism.
It is, sad to say, outright fascism.
And all three have signed on.