Lawfare: The Corruption of our Legal System

The abuse of our legal system for insidious purposes seems to be growing every day. The political rewards for the Left are abundant, and the costs for the Right are horrendous. And yet the outcomes from these acts continue, with no end in sight. This is where we find ourselves:

The newest buzzword in our politics is lawfare, or using the legal system as a weapon against a political opponent. It sits before us now as a spectacle of political gluttony. How many lawsuits, court motions and judgments against Donald Trump can the Democratic Party chow down? More disturbing is the high price the American system may pay for this excess.

The calamity that Leftist members of the legal system are creating seems to escape their awareness. They don’t realize that not only are they damaging the status of the legal system, but their own personal reputations are being destroyed in the process. They don’t realize that half the population is beginning to understand the destruction they are causing, because the abuse is so extreme. Politics are being subsumed into the legal process and everyone is a potential victim.

The origins of the word “lawfare” emerged as part of military strategy, developed by Charles Dunlap, J.D. He explained it this way:

Thus, the law can be employed as something of a weapon – an instrumentalization of the law that purists abhor but which to me reflects reality. Whether such use is for good or for ill depends much upon who is wielding it and why. There are legitimate forms of lawfare that can serve to mitigate the destructiveness of war, but there are also abusive interpretations which seek to turn adherence to the law into a vulnerability to be exploited by malevolent actors.

I wasn’t aware of the source of the word, but ironically, Dunlap’s definition describes precisely how lawfare in the legal profession is being used. And I think it’s fair to conclude that it is being “exploited by malevolent actors.”

I especially appreciated another author’s observations about how, until recently, the law has served this country extraordinarily well:

The American rule of law sustained our capacity for self-governance. The legal system midwifed the most sophisticated property rights regime in the world, improved our collective reasoning faculties, balanced the imperative of change with the demands of tradition, and settled disputes of trivial insignificance as well as controversies of monumental importance. The system functioned so well that most Americans never even thought about it. And it commanded such astonishing respect that virtually everyone obeyed its commands in even the most partisan contests.

I realized then the extent and devastation that lawfare has inflicted on our country. Those who use lawfare not only attack our citizens, but they pursue conservative lawyers or those who choose to defend conservative causes:

If the legal system exists to deter violence by providing an alternative forum for dispute resolution, access denial lawfare upends that purpose. Until recently, America had never witnessed a systematic effort to deny millions of people access to the legal system. Now, it’s commonplace. The 65 Project is one such effort deployed by Big Law regime apparatchiks. These opportunists have filed grievances around the country, seeking to disbar conservative attorneys who advanced causes disapproved by the regime.

The specific effect on the targeted attorneys has been devastating: John Eastman, a constitutional originalist, has spent enormous sums defending his California license against this cynical attack. But the general chill is even worse. Even if the regime fails to take the bar licenses of Eastman and 64 other conservative attorneys, every attorney in the country will think twice about taking a case the regime opposes. There will then be nobody willing to advance or defend conservative causes, or even their rights to freedom of speech, assembly, and religion. [italics mine]

And now we’ve seen the weaponization of federal and state criminal law through the cases brought by federal prosecutor Jack Smith, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, Attorney General Letitia James, and District Attorney Alvin Bragg, all against Donald Trump.

There are other abuses as well; you can count on the Left to be able to commit endless types of attacks.

You might ask, as I have, how is all this corruption and abuse possible? Victor Davis Hanson explains what all these machinations have in common: (1) the defendant is a conservative; excuses are made for those on the Left to avoid justice; (2) the judges make excuses for not charging those on the Left, such as the jury will not convict them; (3) they make excuses for manipulating the law; (4) Leftist judges excuse all those on the Left.

Kevin O’Leary weighed in with these thoughts:

There is certainly an argument that Trump could make an emergency appeal for relief to a higher court, citing violations of the 8th Amendment (excessive fines) and the 14th Amendment (due process). But in the United States of America, it should never have gotten this far. And at this point, the rot in our legal system has become so advanced and reaches so high that there may no longer be any adults to call into the room.

What will it take to end this unconscionable practice? When will people realize that they could be the next person on the chopping block?