Lawyers can stop dictators, but first they must get uncomfortable
Say It Louder
Frank Bowman is a law professor and former federal and state prosecutor.
Donald Trump’s drive to install himself as elected dictator can succeed only if he destroys the rule of law in the United States. Trump has already eliminated Congress as an independent lawmaking body by reducing the Republican Party—which holds majorities in both houses—to a band of quaking sycophants. In the executive branch, by declaring himself the sole authoritative interpreter of law and systematically firing anyone who dissents or indeed might do so, he has made the Führerprinzip the rule of legal decision.
At present, all eyes are on the federal judiciary as it considers challenges by state and local governments and private actors to the Trump administration’s many illegal initiatives. The conventional thinking is that judges are the last line of defense and that if the courts acquiesce in Trump’s grab for dictatorial power or if Trump simply defies judicial orders, as he may have begun to do over the weekend, Trump’s triumph will be complete.
The federal judiciary is certainly key, but it is a mistake to view judges in isolation. The true obstacle between Trump and dictatorship is not the judges alone but the entire legal system and the legal profession—judges and lawyers.
Read on Slate >
Activist have found a way to warn communities of incoming ICE raids
More Of This
A small group of activists assembled before dawn on a recent day in a South L.A. parking lot preparing to patrol the neighborhood. The gathering was not unlike what you see when police congregate in a parking lot preparing for a raid.
Only this time, the target was federal immigration agents.
The activists were from the Community Self Defense Coalition, which fights for immigrant rights. They were armed with two-way radios, bullhorns, and were trained to spot undercover vehicles from U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement or the Department of Homeland Security.
Read on LAist >
An interview with the conservative lawyer who helped destroy DEI
Listen To This
Four years ago, Richard Hanania was a little-known right-wing intellectual, one of many posters building a brand with tweets and Substack posts attacking “wokeness” and other conservative bugbears.
But in the middle of 2021, one of his ideas took off. In an article called “Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law,” Hanania argued that many issues conservatives worry about aren’t just cultural, but also stem from civil rights law — and specifically from Executive Order 11246, an order signed by Lyndon Johnson in 1965 that requires most federal contractors to take “affirmative action” in their hiring. In 2023, Hanania expanded on the article in a book, The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics.
Listen on Vox >
MLK’s dream of economic affirmative action was slowly destroyed by the Supreme Court
Listen To This
Richard D. Kahlenberg is lawyer, writer, and director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute.
In the era of Donald Trump, many liberals understandably look back with fondness at the time when Republican moderates recognized that racial diversity strengthens institutions.
Such nostalgia can include favorable feelings for three Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices who, over the course of nearly four decades, provided the crucial swing votes to sustain racial affirmative action in higher education. Nixon appointee Lewis F. Powell Jr. did so in the 1978 Bakke decision. Reagan appointee Sandra Day O’Connor did so in the 2003 Grutter ruling. And another Reagan appointee, Anthony Kennedy, did so in the 2016 Fisher case.
But what if that view is wrong? Looking back today, after the Supreme Court’s 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision, which struck down racial preferences, a very different picture emerges. Many (though not all) colleges have managed to preserve previous levels of racial diversity by adopting new programs to admit more low-income and working-class students of all races.
Read on Slate >
