After securing the craven surrender of high profile liberal law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP without even entering a courtroom, an emboldened Downmarket Mussolini has ordered his comically corrupt Attorney General, Pam Bondi, to seek disciplinary actions against lawyers who are "filing frivolous claims designed to cause delays." What's a "frivolous claim?" Only Trump and Bondi know, but the note about delays makes it clear that Der Führer is angry that his fascist agenda is being blocked by numerous judicial restraining orders and hopes to do an end around the courts by threatening lawyers and law firms into not even filing suits to halt the regime in the first place.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/22/trump-ramps-ups-retribution-campaign-against-legal-community
Trump ramps up retribution campaign against legal community
"The memo, as a result, created a formal mechanism for Trump to unilaterally decide whether to impose politically charged sanctions through executive orders that strip lawyers of the security clearances they need to perform their jobs or prevent them from working on federal contracts.
Multiple legal experts suggested the memo would theoretically allow Bondi to decide a particular lawsuit that triggered a temporary injunction was causing an unnecessary delay, and refer the firm that filed the suit to face the effects of a punitive executive order.
That could cause a chilling effect and lead to the volume of litigation against the Trump administration to decline, the experts said. Even if the lawsuits are in fact for a legitimate purpose, there’s fear that their representation could put them in the president’s cross hairs and endanger their legal practices.
Trump also directed Bondi to open a review into the “conduct” of lawyers and their respective law firms in litigation against the federal government reaching back to the start of his first term in 2017 – and recommend whether it warranted additional punitive actions.
The memo comes as Trump in recent weeks has used executive orders targeting law firms to great effect."
Frankly, I don't have much to add here that we didn't already look at when I wrote up the Paul Weiss surrender situation we discussed a few days ago. The fact is that Trump has no legal authority to harass and punish lawyers for bringing cases before a judge to stop the Trump regime's often illegal, and frequently unconstitutional activities. Providing a check to the executive branch's power when it violates our civil rights, exceeds the President's authority, or is just straight up criming, is literally the prescribed role of the judiciary branch in the American system of government; the lawyers filing suits to stop Trump's fascist agenda aren't doing anything wrong, they're in fact doing their job as defined in the US Constitution. Trump just doesn't give a shit, and if he can't break the judges ruling against him, he'll happily try to further his authoritarian agenda by using his Department of Justice to harass the lawyers filing against his actions, and starving the law firms of federal access and contracts.
The good news here is that unlike some of their cowardly brethren in white shoe DC law firms, numerous legal advocacy organizations more closely associated with civil rights litigation, are openly stating that they have no intention of backing down. Groups like the ACLU, the Center for Reproductive Rights, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, and Democracy Forward, have all issued statements pushing back on Trump's claims and promising to not only continue the fight, but also to keep bringing more cases against an overreaching Trump regime now acting unlawfully pretty much every day.
I'm not sure how much faith I have in the lawyers and the courts to stop fascism; after all, none of these folks have an army or a police force at their disposal to enforce court orders against a fascist regime and a president already granted virtual legal immunity by a 6-3 fascist high SCOTUS. But as I mentioned elsewhere, you can't win if you don't fight, and it is impossible to install a fascist dictatorship without a whole lot of collaboration, cowardice, and capitulation by the society the fascists are trying to dominate. Win or lose, fighting back is the first step towards stopping fascism, and as a society our best hope of resisting remains acting in infinite ways, across every sector, to make it cost more in time, effort, money, and if necessary in blood, to impose fascism, than the folks doing so stand to benefit from that fascism. Saying "no" is at least a start.
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