Companies’ in-house lawyers are also nervous. They want to make sure their outside counsel is willing to fight the government if necessary. One lawyer working in a company’s general counsel office told Business Insider that her company’s advisors at a law firm that made a deal with Trump said it was necessary to hold onto influence with regulators.
“It just feels very cynical,” said the in-house lawyer, who wants to redirect work to other firms. “I don’t feel comfortable, if you’re going to cave in front of the government, that you’re going to represent me in front of the government.”
Even if you’re used to getting fucked over, why roll over? Fight back!
The firms that have settled are shitheels but one thing to think about…these law firms won’t be able to do the work Trump wants to. They won’t break the law like Trump’s typical DollarGeneral lawyers. The moment they go to court they’ll be truthful and say, “we ain’t got shit” and be hosed.
This is very funny to me:
In a hearing on April 23, US District Judge Beryl Howell, who is overseeing Perkins Coie’s case, appeared incredulous at the government’s arguments. She subjected Richard Lawson, a Justice Department lawyer, to a barrage of often sarcastic questions about the scope of the executive order, brushing aside some of his positions as “hyper-technical legal arguments that may have no merit.”
On the docket, meanwhile, the administration is outgunned.
The two lawyers representing the government are Chad Mizelle, US Attorney General Pam Bondi’s chief of staff, who worked in the first Trump administration and at a pair of elite law firms, and Lawson, who joined the Justice Department after a stint at a conservative nonprofit founded by Trump aide Stephen Miller.
Most of their legal arguments rely on constitutional interpretation of unchecked executive authority. This is actually the argument of a very prominent legal scholar and professor of constitutional law at Harvard.
While they’ve been calling everyone around them bureaucratic elitists, they’ve now jumped into the game very confidently but totally dependent on this argument only to have a judge essentially say, this may make for a good publication on legal theory but essentially has no basis in reality 🤣
And which prominent Harvard professor?
There was another DOJ lawyer who accidentally leaked legal plans on the public docket that basically said, “we ain’t got shit.”
Any real lawyer isn’t going to lie for the DOJ and there was a reason that Trump was using bottom of the barrel lawyers to lose over a half a billion in lawsuits and 37 felonies.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Fsnr9yNEh7c
Legal scholars are usually very knowledgeable about the law, but not always great lawyers in the courtroom (hence the judge basically rolling her eyes at the argument).
Adrian Vermeule is a right wing constitutional law professor/legal scholar. He will never show up in court, but he is definitely influencing their legal argument.
NYT actually just released an article today asking legal experts their opinion on what’s happening now. Of course Vermeule somehow managed to put the blame on the courts and not the administration.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/28/opinion/trump-constitution-rule-of-law.html
https://archive.is/zGrab
The impression of a constitutional crisis is misleading. That impression was initially created by overreaching district judges selected by plaintiffs, who obtained temporary victories and leveraged those victories in the media. If there is a crisis, it does not arise from the actions of the administration but instead from a slew of highly aggressive judicial decisions that have transgressed traditional legal limits on the relationship between the judiciary and the executive branch — limits the courts respected during the Biden administration. — Adrian Vermeule, professor, Harvard Law School
Hmm maybe that reasoning can have him end up like the other (formarly) respected academic law professor.
It’s a constitutional crisis when the executive branch reports US citizens.
You may be technically right but talking about the nonexistent legal justification for Trump’s actions at a time like this feels a lot like telling black people that because the civil rights act got passed in the 60s racism can’t happen anymore. In other words, yes there’s a rule but it doesn’t mean shit if it isn’t enforced.
??? That seems like kind of a bizarre takeaway, but just to be clear, this is far from over. We are in no way in the safe zone. Not even a little bit, DO NOT get complacent.
Adrian Vermeule, the Harvard Law professor, who is behind their legal argument has been writing about executive authority and Carl Schmitt (the legal architect of the Nazi agenda) for several years.
Unchecked executive authority is what allowed Hitler to legally carry out genocide. This is a very dangerous group of people.
It’s just very funny that a group of ivy league and silicon valley billionaires have been spending the last few months trying to rally the public and get them on their side by somehow claiming that anyone opposed to their actions is an out of touch elitist.
Meanwhile, the legal theory for the constitutional interpretation that is the basis of their entire power grab (judges can’t overrule a president’s order, we don’t have to have a warrant if we break down your door claiming we’re looking for gang members bc executive authority overrules individual liberty) is so highly technical and obscure, that it is actually a pretty flimsy argument and definitely out of touch with most American’s interpretation of the constitution (we the people did not want to be ruled by a king, so you can pry our liberty from our cold dead hands).
Someone like justice Alito (who also coincidentally happens to be an ivy league graduate) would probably still support Vermeule’s interpretation, so a weak argument is no guarantee of protection. What often seems to make or break the argument, is public knowledge and opinion, which can then lead to public pressure due to justices hoping to preserve their legacy in history.
You already have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to make the argument in the first place, but it would be next to impossible to make the public aware of this interpretation, and view it as anything other than an attempt to create a loophole allowing for the King to invade your home and seize your property, while taking away your right to defend yourself.