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Roughly eight minutes before this long-scheduled Substack Live on Friday, a federal judge issued an opinion blocking Donald Trump’s executive order targeting the law firm Perkins Coie for political retribution.
U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, who presided over Trump’s criminal grand jury investigations, opened her ruling with a reference to the widely misunderstood Shakespeare quote, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” She then quoted the late Justice John Paul Stevens on the true meaning of the line: “that disposing of lawyers is a step in the direction of a totalitarian form of government.” She found that Trump’s “campaign of retribution” against the law firm violated the First, Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, in a sweeping, 102-page memorandum opinion.
Howell’s not alone on the federal bench in her historically minded focus.
Just two days earlier on Wednesday, Vermont-based U.S. District Judge Geoffrey W. Crawford invoked the “moral panics” of U.S. history in a ruling releasing Columbia University student and green card holder Mohsen Mahdawi from immigration detention. “Our nation has seen times like this before, especially during the Red Scare and Palmer Raids of 1919-1920 that led to the deportation of hundreds of people suspected of anarchist or communist views,” Crawford wrote.
On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, a Ronald Reagan appointee, mused about the survival of the U.S. constitutional order in a ruling ordering the Trump administration to release the more than $12 million in congressionally appropriated dollars to Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.
“By enjoining the defendants’ efforts to dismantle the plaintiff networks, actions which I perceive to be contrary to the law, I am humbly fulfilling my small part in this very constitutional paradigm—a framework that has propelled the United States to heights of greatness, liberty and prosperity unparalleled in the history of the world for nearly 250 years. If our nation is to thrive for another 250 years, each co-equal branch of government must be willing to courageously exert the authority entrusted to it by our Founders."
Those are just passages from decisions issued this week!
What has so many judges thinking about what happens when nations sink into tyranny and repression?
We explore that question with The Breakdown’s Allison Gill, known to many from Mueller She Wrote, The Daily Beans and other podcasts she creates through MSW Media.
Also during our conversation: I describe the work All Rise News has been doing to locate the public’s power to respond to Trump’s attacks on the rule of law.
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