Jonathan P. Baird

June is the month when the U.S. Supreme Court drops many of its big opinions from its merits docket. Of less notice but very consequential are decisions rendered on the Court’s shadow docket. The shadow or emergency docket includes those decisions when there is no legal reasoning. They are unsigned, unexplained decrees.

During the Trump era, both in its first term and now, the shadow docket has ramped up and become much more prominent. Trump’s solicitor generals have sought emergency relief far more often than previous administrations. They know which way the wind is blowing.

In fact, 99% of the Court’s decisions take place on the shadow docket.

The most recent notable example was the May decision in Wilcox v NLRB. In that case, the Court declined to reinstate Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board and Kathy Harris of the Merit System Protection Board after they were fired by Trump. They are out of jobs while the litigation continues and realistically their jobs are history. The Court majority would not have allowed the firings if it was not a certainty how they would ultimately rule.

Under federal law, both Wilcox and Harris were protected from removal by the President. Congress had passed a statute that required good cause for removal. With neither Wilcox nor Harris was there any allegation of a good cause reason for removal. Congress had designed independent federal agencies to be both bi-partisan and balanced. Here the Court essentially trashed Congress’s clear roadmap.

Additionally, there has been a 90 year old precedent, the case of Humphrey’s Executor v U.S., which has upheld protections against removal for members of independent federal agencies like the NLRB and the MSPB. Yet, the Court, without explanation, overruled existing law. The Court said nothing about Humphrey’s Executor although it has been widely anticipated that the Court would eventually overrule that precedent.

By removing Wilcox from the NLRB, there are only two members left on the board which is insufficient for a quorum. Without a quorum, the NLRB cannot hear cases or make decisions. The NLRB exists to hear cases about the violation of worker’s rights. In effect, the Court is stymying and delaying accountability for unfair labor practices. Justice delayed is justice denied and the Supreme Court’s action furthers the interests of Big Business and the Trump administration who both oppose labor.

I would mention that Gwynne Wilcox was the first Black woman to serve on the NLRB and the first Black chair of that board. During her tenure, the NLRB supported workers’ collective bargaining rights and adopted a more pro-worker stance.

Wilcox aside, there are many reasons for the diminished reputation of the Supreme Court. Always siding with the billionaire class and the powerful against workers, failing to investigate and clean up its very public corruption, and giving a convicted felon almost absolute criminal immunity are three reasons.

The shadow docket doesn’t help what is already an embarrassing picture. The Court’s majority makes political decisions that help their Republican allies and they do it with no explanation while disregarding precedent. Shadow dockets were not supposed to be used to change the law.

Professor Stephen Vladeck, author of The Shadow Docket, has written that the Supreme Court’s legitimacy depends on its ability to explain itself. He says the rise of the shadow docket is anathema to that understanding. There is a connection between the increased use of the shadow docket and the decline in public confidence in the Supreme Court.

Wilcox is not the first shadow docket decision of significance. A little less than a year before the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs overturning abortion rights, the Court majority refused to block Texas’ ban of abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy. The Texas court ruling flagrantly violated Roe v Wade which was still the law of the land. That was wildly improper but as with Wilcox, it was a tip off on the position of the Court’s conservative majority.

At a time when the nation faces an unprecedented authoritarian threat from an out-of-control President, the Court gives that president expanded powers. It was not enough for the Court majority to shamefully and wrongfully protect Trump from crimes he has committed. They feed the would-be dictator’s power grab at the expense of Congress. Right wing authoritarianism is moving on many fronts to strengthen their grip on power and control. The shadow docket isn’t doing law. It is doing politics for the Trump team.

The reckless use of the shadow docket as in Wilcox will only breed more contempt for the Court. In the case of Planned Parenthood v Casey, Justices Souter, Kennedy, and O’Connor wrote:

“..the Court’s legitimacy depends on making legally principled decisions under circumstances in which their principled character is sufficiently plausible to be accepted by the Nation.”

The current Supreme Court majority has lost its way. They are about using their super-majority to achieve MAGA goals as quickly as possible.

I thought of diversity, equity and inclusion when I heard about the death of Sly Stone of Sly and the Family Stone fame. Sly died on June 9. His whole persona stood in opposition to the crusade against DEI. I liked what Questlove wrote about Sly:

“He had a way of talking, moving from playful to earnest at will. He had a look, belts, and hats and jewelry. Everybody was a star, as he said (and sang) but he was a special case, cooler than everything around him by a factor of infinity.”

Sly was the vision of radical inclusion. He was about getting everyone up and dancing. He left no one behind. Sly opposed racism of all varieties. His singing “I Want To Take You Higher” at Woodstock was pure joy and unifying to all who experienced it.

Coming out of an American history of deep segregation, Sly pioneered having a mixed sex, multi-racial band. Shocking as it is to acknowledge because it didn’t happen until the late 1960’s, Sly’s band was the first big-name American rock band that was integrated both racially and sexually.

You cannot appreciate Sly’s radical quality unless you situate in the late1950’s-early 1960’s environment. To say America wasn’t integrated doesn’t convey lived reality. Black and white people lived in different universes that were separate and unequal. Donny Hathaway singing The Ghetto comes to mind.
Opponents of DEI forget that segregation utterly defined America only a short time ago. As a society we have never honestly faced this history. There has never been any Truth and Reconciliation commission here. Sly didn’t accept that status quo and in his own way, he lived opposition.

Of 1960’s counterculture heroes, I think Sly is most under-rated. Maybe a definitive statement of the 1960’s peace-and-love world view was his song “Everyday People”. It is stunning how one song can say so much and do it so beautifully. The lyrics are simple and memorable:

“There is a blue one who can’t accept the green one
For living with the black one trying to be a skinny one
.Different strokes for different folks..”

It is a lead up to the killer lines:

“We’ve got to live together!
I am no better, and neither are you
We are the same whatever we do…”

There is no better statement of egalitarianism. That callout “I am everyday people” was like the hippie national anthem. Other Sly songs are equally memorable. “Stand” was a great song about fighting injustice.

“Stand for the things you know are right
It’s the truth that the truth makes them so uptight.”

I always loved “Dance To The Music”. No song could get people up and dancing faster. Later on, there is the melancholic “Family Affair”. Sly was not a shallow pop star. He knew sadness and almost self-destruction.

For Sly Fans, I wanted to recommend his autobiography Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) co-written with Ben Greenman in 2023. There was much I didn’t know about Sly’s life. His voice comes through strongly in the book.

Sly grew up in a religious Pentecostal family that loved music. The family sang together. Sly was a musical prodigy and multi-instrumentalist. He played keyboards, guitar, bass, harmonica and drums. As a child he sang with his siblings in a gospel group. At age 11, he was performing six or seven times a week at church functions.

Before he became famous, he worked as a disc jockey at San Francisco’s soul station, KSOL. He had eclectic tastes and he played Dylan, Ray Charles, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Aretha and the Staple Singers. He also went on to work as a record producer in the Bay Area and he knew the whole music scene and produced, among others, Grace Slick. Whether it was as a DJ or a musician, there was an open-minded spirit of inclusion in his work.

He mixed funk, soul, gospel and rock. Musical historian Rickey Vincent described Sly’s band as “too hot and too black to be rock, too positive to be blues and too wild to be soul”.

Sly’s autobiography shows the out-of-control craziness of his lifestyle when he was living the largest. Super-stardom was an impossible burden. The pressures to keep producing at the level he was were too much. The disintegration of the band and Sly’s chronic drug use turned him into a recluse. He isolated and he had a tremendous problem breaking from his drug habits.

In evaluating Sly and his musical legacy, I think the great moments are what we should focus on. Everyone has contradictions and peaks and valleys in their life. Given how hard he lived, it is amazing that Sly lived until 82. He watched Janis and Jimi go down early and I am sure he knew it could have been him.

In his song ”Everybody is a star”, Sly wrote:

“Everybody is a star
I can feel it when you shine on me
I love you for who you are
Not the one you feel you need to be…”

That is the authentic Sly Stone.

It is hard to get your head around the scope of the totalitarian project being engineered by the Trump regime. The dimensions of the project are expansive. Instead of a constitutional republic, they desire a monarch-president with greatly expanded powers. Instead of three co-equal branches of government, they favor an entirely submissive Congress (which they have) and a corrupt complicit Supreme Court whose majority acquiesces to the Executive.

They are a constellation of mediocre white yes-men (with a few white women thrown in) who will sell out the working class every time in favor of billionaires.

Back in the 1960’s, people on the left emphasized naming the system responsible for the Vietnam War. Now we need to name the revised system which Trump and his cronies have created. Capitalism is a tired old word that inadequately conveys what is coming. It is only part of the picture.

The Steve Bannon metaphor “flooding the zone’ comes closer to describing how the process is unfolding but the project is anything but populist. As noted, it is at the service of the billionaire class and their profit.

There is the war on colleges and universities. Then there is the war on science and scientific research. There is also a war to control federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency. As with classical fascism, there is scapegoating and the need to blame an entity. These fascists have landed on immigrants to explain all that is wrong in America.

Although they have tried unsuccessfully to align immigration with criminality, much of the Trump regime’s anti-immigrant aggression has been directed at students. There is a thinly veiled anti-intellectualism underlying this offensive. They want to kick foreign students out of the country, especially students of color. The reasons given are invariably flimsy. It is usually an op-ed written to defend Palestinian rights or something the student posted on social media that contravenes Trumpian orthodoxy.

Most liberal or progressive commentators are seeing a piece of what is going on but not the big picture. The Trump regime is attempting to criminalize dissent. International students get arrested for the crime of expressing a minority view. Then they get shipped to distant jurisdictions and face deportation. The Trump regime wants to set the parameters for allowable thought.

What is going on is far worse than McCarthyism. In the past, even if politicians were upset with a professor or the goings-on at a particular university, they were not trying to control the intellectual life of whole universities. Now the Trump regime wants to control curriculum. They want to decide what is intellectually acceptable. This is an unprecedented threat to academic freedom.

To quote Vice-President Vance, “professors are the enemy”. The Trump regime wants control of all cultural and artistic institutions, particularly those that are left leaning or are more free-thinking. They hate that universities and cultural institutions like the Smithsonian have made a sincere effort to promote diversity, equity and inclusion. Cancelling millions of dollars in grants to researchers, banning international students and attempting to eliminate tax exempt status as they are doing at Harvard are part of their power grab scheme.

Harvard has been forced to sue because the university recognized Trump’s agenda is an attack on the First Amendment. It is a stand-in for all colleges and universities who all face the same threat to academic freedom. The Trump regime is using antisemitism (which they could care less about) as an excuse to attack private institutions outside their control.

Surveillance capitalism is now employed to monitor the social media accounts of thousands of foreign students. ICE and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are using AI and data mining to find suspect students whose visa could get revoked. Tech companies are cooperating with this endeavor. The effort has a Big Brother quality.

A further follow-the-money aspect is the connection between Trump’s mass round-up of immigrants and the private prison companies that profit from that enterprise. Companies like GEO and CoreCivic are making a killing housing masses of arrested immigrants who have no criminal convictions. These companies run what are effectively concentration camps and they charge the government $120,000 per immigrant. The companies then donate a percentage of profit back to Trump.

Many of these arrested immigrants have American citizen children. The private prison industry has effectively turned these children into orphans.

Trump’s war on science deserves mention. His administration has arbitrarily fired thousands of workers who ran America’s scientific infrastructure. The effort is about destroying the U.S. as an international center of learning. It will absolutely lead to a brain drain. You might think no one would benefit from assaulting science but since the COVID-19 pandemic, MAGA conservatives have made anti-science a new normal. In the name of health freedom and fighting elitism, they dismiss mainstream science, including around vaccines.

The budget bill that passed the House cuts biomedical research on cancer, infectious disease and Alzheimer’s. These MAGA conservatives seem determined to lower life expectancy in the U.S. It is like they are at war with scientific expertise if they perceive it as in conflict with their hard right ideology.

This shows up most blatantly around climate change. The Trump regime has withdrawn support from any science research that even mentions the words “climate change”. They have purged government websites of climate data. They are escalating the production of greenhouses gases, like a death wish.

Looking broadly, what is going on is the equivalent of a national book burning. Anything that conflicts with the Trump game plan goes into the burn pile. It is the new Dark Ages. The masked, unidentified ICE agent who is armed to the teeth is their public image.

Nothing is automatic in this life though. MAGA’s jihad to undermine liberal democracy is not a done deal. While we still have some rights, it is incumbent on people of all political persuasions to push back hard. We can stop this.

One of the biggest stories of the second Trump presidency has to be its mushrooming corruption scandals. A major theme of this presidency is self-enrichment and the normalization of white collar crime.

Just when you thought it could not get worse, there are surprises. I had thought the profiting-off crypto was the worst. Since January, Trump has been adding a billion dollars a month to his family fortune. But then along came his palace-in-the-sky, the $400 million luxury jet gifted by the Qatari royal family.

Trump had complained that Arab leaders had bigger and more impressive airplanes than the current Air Force One. His preference is for Louis XIV-style opulence and gold ornamentation. He said it would be stupid to turn down “a free, very expensive airplane”. The plan is for the jet to be used first as Air Force One and then it is supposed to be given to Trump’s presidential library foundation.

Whether it would remain available for Trump’s personal use after he leaves office remains contested.

The ethical and legal questions jump out. The Framers of the Constitution sought to prevent corruption in drafting the Foreign Emoluments Clause. That clause prohibits the president from receiving any profit, gain or advantage from foreign governments without the consent of Congress.

The jet looks to be an unconstitutional payoff from a foreign government to the president. Congress hasn’t authorized the deal. No president has ever accepted a gift of this magnitude from a foreign government. The formerly royal jet raises the spectre that the Qatari government will receive favorable treatment because of the gift.

And this arrangement doesn’t begin to get to national security concerns. The Qatari jet would require a costly, time-consuming renovation to meet the intensive security, safety and technical standards of an Air Force One. The plane would have to be stripped down to ensure there are no listening devices or secret technology hidden away. That cost alone could be enormous and it is not clear the work could be finished before January 2029 when Trump is slated to leave office.

I think extravagant gift-giving like the Qatari luxury jet perfectly illustrates the core model of behavior we see in this presidency. Corrupt gifts are this Administration’s life blood. Donors line up to purchase desired results.

When I was in junior high school, I had a very witty math teacher named Mr. Harper. I remember Mr. Harper saying, “Every man has his price”. So it is with Donald Trump.

We see this most clearly in how he is authorizing and selling pardons. Presidents do have broad pardon authority but Trump has misused the power to pardon white collar criminals and his political allies who have earned their prison sentences. You might think pardons would be about correcting some blatant injustice. This is absolutely not the case with Trump. His mission is to pardon the worst cheats and crooks.

In the last week, there is the Paul Walczak story. Walczak was hired by his mother to run a Florida nursing home and to act as a CEO. Over the course of years, he stole $10 million out of the paychecks of his employees (doctors, nurses and health care workers) and he stopped paying taxes. He used the money he stole to finance a luxurious lifestyle, including private jets and purchase of a $2 million yacht.

Walczak pled guilty and he was sentenced to 18 months in prison and he was ordered to pay $4.4 million in restitution. At sentencing, the judge said “there is no get out of jail free card”. However, Trump granted Walczak a full and unconditional pardon meaning he would do no jail time and he was off the hook for the $4.4 million restitution. As a result, all the health care workers he cheated get no compensation for being ripped off.

Walczak’s mother, Elizabeth Fago, has a history of raising millions for Trump campaigns. The Trump pardon came less than three weeks after she attended a $1 million per-person fundraising dinner at Mar-a-Lago that promised face-to-face access to Trump. Good deal: pay one million so you don’t have to pay four.

At almost the same time as the Walczak pardon came the pardon of reality-TV stars Todd and Julie Chrisley, who had been convicted of evading taxes and defrauding banks of more than $30 million. They had submitted false financial documents to obtain loans they used to fund a lavish lifestyle. The Chrisleys’ daughter, Savannah, has been a big player in the MAGA universe. She spoke at the Republican National Convention. She also was interviewed on FOX by Lara Trump about her parents. This pardon was tossing red meat to the base.

There are many other stories like Walczak and the Chrisleys where Trump has granted pardons. There is a New York lawsuit going on now where Rudy Giuliani’s former assistant Noelle Dunphy is suing Giuliani and alleging in her lawsuit that Giuliani was selling pardons for $2 million, which he and President Trump would split.

Trump has been signaling to his billionaire friends and his political allies that there is no longer any enforcement of white collar crime law. Likewise, he is signaling to foreign donors: pony up and let’s make a deal. His purge of the Department of Justice lawyers ensures no consequences for criminality. There is nothing to get in the way of leader wealth maximization.

Never has corruption been so out front. This presidency has replaced any sense of national self-interest with the family interest of the would-be king. We are all being played for suckers.

As the outlines of President Trump’s budget bill emerged into clearer focus, one fact became apparent. The bill has a shocker price tag. According to the Congressional Budget Office, over ten years, as many as 13.7 million Medicaid recipients will lose their health insurance. It will be the biggest loss of health care coverage ever sustained in American history.

The blow to health care this represents is nothing short of devastating. For poor and working people, this bill strips away what system of health care coverage has existed and replaces it with a far inferior model replete with new impediments. The new impediments are significant. They create barriers to access so that many fewer will qualify for care.

Adding work requirements to Medicaid is a key vehicle for the cuts and projected cost savings. Burdensome and repeated verification requirements are a proven recipe for shrinking rolls. While it may sound good to the uninitiated, there is a body of negative experience with states using such requirements. They create red tape to facilitate churning claimants and recipients off Medicaid.

New Hampshire, along with Arkansas, implemented work requirements in 2019 during Trump 1.0 but suspended the program and the federal court then halted it. There was confusion leading very large numbers to being disenrolled. Yet, those behind the new budget bill entirely ignore the history of how work requirements led to mass disenrollment.

The idea to make employment a precondition to Medicaid is bad public policy. Work requirements actually block access to medically necessary services that might enable work capacity. Medicaid is not a cash assistance welfare program. The purpose of Medicaid has been to furnish medical assistance, rehabilitation and other services that will help individuals attain and retain independence and self-care.

The budget bill plays on the stereotype of able-bodied, lazy people who are choosing not to work to get benefits but the stereotype gets it wrong. Nearly two out of three adult Medicaid enrollees aged 19-64 already work and most of the rest would be exempted for reasons like having a disability, caring for a family member or attending school.

Older adults receiving Medicaid will be particularly hard hit by the cuts. Around 70% of low income adults aged 50-64 live with chronic conditions and experience poor health. Under the budget bill, workers in all states up to age 65 will be subject to the work requirements. Experience has shown that exemptions commonly fail to work and end up excluding many who should remain eligible. It is a safe bet that millions who should be eligible will be locked out of coverage for extended time periods because of red tape..

The harm of the upcoming Medicaid cuts, starting at the end of 2026, is not well-understood. Not having health insurance literally kills. To avoid incurring costs, many will not go to the doctor or they will delay going. If they are suffering from cardiovascular illness, diabetes or cancer, delay could be life-threatening. People will not obtain the medication or treatment they need in a timely fashion.

Putting off care when conditions can be best-treated will lead to worse outcomes and higher costs later as often happens when an uninsured person lands in an emergency room. A new study by investigators at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, Boston University and the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, published in the Lancet, found that reduction in Medicaid coverage could lead to thousands of additional deaths among working-age Americans as well as a disastrous financial burden for hundreds of thousands.

The Lancet article found that Medicaid cuts have a ripple effect on patient’s children, their parents and seniors who depended on the patient for care. Families experienced increased stress when primary breadwinners were out of commission. Medical debt can pile up, especially on those who have complex health needs. Those in worse health or those contending with a disability often suffered income loss because of difficulty in maintaining continuous employment.

In the past, Medicaid has generally not required co-pays or any balance billing beyond the Medicaid payment rate. There was an understanding that low income people could not afford such costs. The budget bill would force some Medicaid recipients to pay more for coverage through premiums or other fees. Such payment is entirely ill-advised as people rely on Medicaid because they cannot afford more costs or any private insurance options. They lack the income. This will be creating another impediment to care.

I saw that some Republicans were citing former President Bill Clinton’s use of work requirements with welfare (TANF) to justify Medicaid work requirements. While they have been touted, Clinton’s work requirements ultimately failed and ruined the TANF program, dramatically reducing the number of enrollees. That program is now a shrunken shell of what it once was which is likely the same goal Republicans have for Medicaid. Reducing the size of the program using excessive paperwork and frequent verification requirements is their goal.

All this is done to line the pockets of the obscenely wealthy so they can receive their precious tax cut. It is about a gluttonous transfer of wealth upwards at the expense of the low income. What happened to the goal of universal health care and recognizing health as a human right? The budget bill moves the ball backwards down the field.

Last Tuesday I attended the Campaign for Legal Services Kickoff Breakfast held at the Grappone Center in Concord. It was a wonderful and well-attended event supporting an entirely worthy goal – legal assistance for poor, elderly and disabled people. Many prominent members of the New Hampshire Bar were present as well as Gov. Kelly Ayotte and our two Congresspeople, Chris Pappas and Maggie Goodlander.

One thing that bothered me about the event was what was not said. You would not have known that the rule of law in America is under serious attack. I heard a few vague references to the importance of due process and the difficulties of being a judge but mostly I heard platitudes about how great the justice system is. There was an unremitting effort to be bipartisan and to pretend normalcy.

Ignoring the 800 pound gorilla in the room doesn’t serve the rule of law. Times are anything but normal. An authoritarian regime is actively attempting to dismantle constitutional rule and it is not hidden. Neither on a state or national level has the Bar responded. This is too reminiscent of other historical circumstances where lawyers did not speak up and collaborated with fascism.

In the last week, President Trump’s senior advisor Stephen Miller explained that the Trump administration was considering suspending habeas corpus. He did not know or care that the authority to suspend habeas is vested in Congress, not the Executive branch. Miller, not a lawyer, said:

“That’s an option we’re actively looking at. A lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.”

The Latin translation for habeas corpus is “deliver the body”. It goes back to the Magna Carta and the idea that people may not be detained without being brought before a judge. It is hard to overstate the importance of habeas corpus. I think it is fair to say it is a bedrock principle in American jurisprudence. No one is above the law, at least theoretically. The principle is embedded in our Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments that hold that “no person should be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law”. I am reminded of John Adams’ famous quote:

“We are to look upon it as more beneficial, that many guilty persons should escape unpunished, than one innocent person should suffer. The reason is, because it’s of more importance to community that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt should be punished; for guilt and crimes are so frequent in the world, that all of them cannot be punished; and many times they happen in such a manner, that it is not of much consequence to the public, whether they are punished or not. But when innocence itself, is brought to the bar and condemned, especially to die, the subject will exclaim, it is immaterial to me, whether I behave well or ill; for virtue itself, is no security. And if such a sentiment as this, should take place in the mind of the subject, there would be an end to all security what so ever.”

The Trump administration is the opposite of John Adams. Their priority is to punish the innocent and to use the law to intimidate. The Kilmar Abrego Garcia case is a prototype for the lawlessness we are seeing. First removal without due process and then stonewalling in bad faith as the Administration ignores a Supreme Court order. No one talks about the over 200 Venezuelan men who were removed from the U.S. without due process. They are all rotting away in a foreign prison. 60 Minutes showed that 75% of these men had no criminal record yet they have been wrongly renditioned.

ICE has been playing the role of Trump’s gestapo. The stories of its outrageous misconduct have been multiplying. Masked and unidentified ICE agents have been disappearing people in the manner of 1970’s-1980’s Latin American fascists. On May 4, ICE agents took away a man filling up gas in his truck at a gas station in Oxnard, California. They disappeared him, drove away and left his children in the truck.

On April 24, ICE agents terrorized a family of U.S. citizens when they broke into a house in Oklahoma City in the middle of the night but the search warrant was meant for someone else. ICE ordered the family out into the rain in their underwear and confiscated the family’s phones, laptops and cash savings as “evidence”. In the last two months, there are cases of U.S. born children having been wrongfully deported without due process. Trump is now seeking a six-fold increase in ICE funding.

Some of the immigrants ICE has picked up have been taken into custody for the crime of writing an op-ed and advocating for Palestinian rights. Now you get arrested and deported for having an opinion. What happened to the First Amendment? Tyrants don’t tolerate dissent.

Then there are the attacks on judges. Trump has displayed a troubling pattern of badmouthing judges who issue rulings he disagrees with. He calls the judges “radical left lunatics” and wants them impeached. Next the MAGA mob descends threatening the judge and his or her family. The Administration orchestrated the arrest of Wisconsin judge Hannah Dugan with the FBI Director Kash Patel posting a photo on X of the handcuffed judge doing a perp walk. This is all about intimidating and threatening the judiciary.

I also must mention the Administration’s perversion of pro bono work. Pro bono work was supposed to be about helping the needy but nine heavy hitter law firms have signed agreements to provide Trump a collective $940 million in free legal work. This is akin to a mob boss shaking down a business. What a terrible example these Big Law firms set!

While being critical of lawyers who bend the knee or stay silent, I also acknowledge and appreciate the heroic actions of many judges who are upholding the rule of law. These judges have shown courage and integrity. Their actions have been critical in holding back the authoritarian tide.

Any student of history knows things could get far worse in the U.S. but that does not negate the darkness and backwardness into which we have fallen as a nation. Trump is about hoarding power for himself. Lawyers and judges have a key role to play in preventing the onset of an American version of fascism.