Kevin Williamson ponders that question in his latest column for National Review Online.
The pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post are the ultimate in clubs that you cannot buy your way into, which is what the fight over “money in politics” is really all about. Democrats, having long enjoyed intimate relations with the press, are confident in their ability to get a more than fair hearing from Dean Baquet or Lester Holt, and they are confident that so long as the terms of the debate are set by the right sort of people, then they’ll prevail. But the club isn’t the only show in town — we are no longer in the age of two newspapers, three television networks, and one wire service to rule them all — and now any old nobody with a big enough pile of money can buy airtime or advertising space and publish whatever the heck he likes. If that means gutting the First Amendment, so be it — every Democrat in the Senate this year voted to do precisely that.
They’d do better to argue for the abolition of private legal representation.
It follows naturally from the progressive line of reasoning: If asymmetrical outcomes for the wealthy are intolerable in elections, where the asymmetry is modest, then they should be double-special intolerable in the courtroom, another political space, where the asymmetry is large — and where there is, on the individual level, much more at stake. The question of whether the mediocre lawyer with the R next to his name or the one with the D next to his name represents you in the House will in most cases make a lot less difference to your health and happiness than the question of “guilty” or “not guilty.” Who knows, we might even get better laws if the well-off cannot use their money to shield themselves from the full force of the American criminal-justice system, which is at times severe to the point of cruelty.
Wouldn’t assigning defense counsel on a lottery system, with all defenders public defenders, be more “fair” than the current system under which the rich get the kid gloves and the poor get the iron fist?
The case against “money in politics” is also the case against money in the courtroom. In fact, the case against money in criminal law is the stronger case, but don’t expect to hear Mrs. C making it: When the time comes, she’ll want the best defense money can buy.
