(Opinion) Each risk to our society and civilization is more dangerous than the one preceding it. And while we are all climbing the risk ladder at an alarming rate, it’s the legions of lawyers who smooth the way, and they must be laughing all the way to the bank.
The word ‘weird’ has recently developed tsunami proportions to describe a Texas judge’s 67-page Good Friday decision to suspend approval by the US Federal Drug Administration FDA of the sale of mifepristone, an abortion drug used safely for more than 20 years.
On the same day, it only took Thomas O. Rice, a state of Washington federal court judge, less than half that number of pages to directly contradict the Texas order.
It required the FDA to refrain from taking any action that would affect the pill’s availability.
Checkmate!
The FDA had better have lots of 180 degrees swivel chairs to swing back and forth and help decide which way to turn in this weird situation. No doubt they’ll also have to hire a bunch of lawyers of their own.
Welcome to the super bowl of dueling lawyers.
During the same week, we have been assaulted by the breathless media coverage of every moment of the arraignment of former president Donald Trump, an event that CNN’s bloviating Wolf Blitzer endlessly called ‘unprecedented’ but never ‘unpresidented’ which it certainly was.
Trump was charged in a New York court for paying $130,000 and accounting for it in nefarious ways to Stormy Danials, an adult film star with whom he was said to have had an affair.
This payment was presumably to ensure that the stormy weather didn’t blow even a drop of rain on his parade toward his 2016 election victory.
His gang of no less than four indictment lawyers joined him at the defense table in the New York courtroom.
That his political action committee has had to shell out more than $10 million in legal fees in the past two years is no surprise.
For weirdness, even this hardly compares to the spat between Dominion, the maker of voting machines, and Fox Corporation, the Rupert Murdoch giant owner of Fox News.
In a 192-page pleading, Dominion is suing Fox for the tidy sum of $1.6 billion for defamation, arguing that Fox hosts and on-air guests Rudolf Giuliani and conspiracy theorist Sydney Powell claimed, without a shred of evidence, that Dominion’s voting machines had been programmed to move votes for Trump to the Biden column.
That, argues Dominion’s legion of lawyers, has hurt Dominion’s reputation. If true, it certainly would.
And if they win, which is likely, a part of that pot of gold should help pay for each of those 192 pages.
Off-air Fox hosts and executives exchanged text and e-mail messages that make it unmistakable they knew that what was being said on-air was lies but that to retain their largely Trump-supporting audience, which hungered for a diet of hope that the election could end up with his victory, Fox had to back that fantasy to guarantee not losing its audience to competitive channels.
You have to give it to Rupert Murdoch for honest answers.
When asked directly in a deposition which way Fox’s’ coverage leaned, he said simply: “If you’re asking whether our coverage is red or blue, I’d say it’s green – it’s the color of money.”
If that leaves anything to the imagination, I can’t guess what it might be except where Murdoch may have picked up that line. Was it from the ‘Succession ‘series?
In Shakespeare’s “Henry VI, Part 2”, a character famously issues the cry, “kill all the lawyers”, a criticism of corrupt lawyers who at the time were seen as exploiting their positions for personal gain.
This is not to suggest that corruption plagues the legal profession so much in the forefront of today’s major issues.
We do have to wonder why the US Supreme Court has allowed its formerly superb reputation to tank so badly. Chief Justice John Roberts seems powerless to arrest the decline.
He is not getting any help from Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, who, with his activist rightwing wife Ginny, as Josh Kaplan of ProPublica reported, has frequently taken advantage of the private jet, superyacht, and luxury properties hospitality of Harlan Crow, a zillionaire and leading GOP donor.
The justice who has enjoyed Harlan Crow’s hospitality for more than two decades did not find it necessary to report this largess to the Court even though justices are required to disclose gifts on their financial disclosure forms, and there is an ethics code that they are expected to adhere to.
Said Mr. Crow, the hospitality to the Thomas’s is no different from how he entertains all his close friends, and he has no matters before the court.
While there is nothing illegal here, it seems a bit weird, especially for a Justice who likes to brag that “I come from regular stock, and I prefer that.
I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that. There’s something normal to me about it.”
Just how weird can it get?