Joy Pullmann of the Federalist documents a disturbing trend in American legal circles.
After the chaotic 2020 election, leftist organizations began filing ethics and even criminal complaints against lawyers who opposed Democrats in election litigation. Democrats have recently expanded these tactics to lawyers who cross Democrats on any policy area.
“Their most sweeping goal is to discourage and chill lawyers from representing Republicans and conservatives, particularly in election law cases. They want to apply a much higher standard to them in order to punish them,” says attorney Jim Bopp Jr., who defeated a politically motivated ethics complaint after representing Wisconsin Special Counsel Michael Gableman over his 2020 investigation that unearthed “widespread election fraud.”
Disciplining conservative, or simply neutral, lawyers can strip Democrats’ opponents of high-quality legal defense, erasing justice by skewing the legal playing field. Most notorious, of course, is former President Donald Trump’s difficulties securing counsel to defend against the multiple lawsuits attempting to bankrupt him and ban voters from selecting him on the ballot.
Democrats are not just seeking to eliminate competent legal defense from Trump. They’re pursuing lawyers who oppose their policies in any domain, from former Attorney General William Barr to his former deputy Jeff Clark to Trump election adviser John Eastman and local lawyers with no national profile such as Janet Angus in Wisconsin and an Arizona prosecutor who wouldn’t let rioters off the hook.
Justice Clarence Thomas has been unrelentingly defamed since the day he was nominated to the Supreme Court. Most recently, the war against his rock-solid constitutional jurisprudence has materialized in multiple politicized ethics complaints.
The Texas Bar Association has been waging war on Attorney General Ken Paxton using ethics complaints. Three Arizona lawyers who contested chaotic election procedures in 2020 and did work for gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake now face discipline complaints before the state supreme court.
