pkv slot Liberals Bet They Could Beat Trump With the Law. They Lost.
The yearslong effort to vanquish Donald Trump in court was a dismal failure.pkv slot
For liberals like me, it may be tempting to attribute the collapse of the various cases against him to convenient explanations of process or personnel. The more uncomfortable truth is that our search for political salvation primarily through the law has backfired. To oppose Mr. Trump in his second term, liberals must learn the lesson of this defeat, which is that there is no alternative to persuading our fellow citizens of our beliefs.
For decades, liberals have made the mistake of prioritizing legal victories over popular ones. It was a method of prolonging the civil rights movement even after its opponents assembled a majority to halt it. Fifty years ago, Richard Nixon’s four Supreme Court appointments — Mr. Trump got only three — shoved the court right and consigned liberals to damage control. While liberals saw breakthroughs afterward for women and L.G.B.T.Q. people, delivering progress more quickly than elections could, they failed to stop the conservative drift of American law.
A few victories made it easy for liberals to forget that the law is just another domain of politics where their enemies enjoy power too. They talked of law as a matter of principle, ignoring that their movement had mainly treated it as a weapon for legalistic political change. Legalism’s greatest theorist, Judith Shklar, defined it as the adoption of an ethics of rule-following and defended it as a useful strategy. Along the way, you claim that the rules are on your side and impose them on your political enemies, and sometimes yourself, because the results are good ones.
The trouble is that they regularly aren’t. In this election, legalistic tactics contributed to Mr. Trump’s victory, helping to produce the popular majority he had never boasted before. For all of Mr. Trump’s misdeeds, prosecuting them was not worth the cost of restoring him to power.
Liberals have rooted their opposition to Mr. Trump in the law since his first month in office, when lawyers descended on airports to challenge his racist travel ban. The results were mixed: The ban was blocked, but then replaced with a version designed to earn the Supreme Court’s sign-off.
The legalistic resistance was supercharged in May 2017 when Robert Mueller was appointed as special counsel to investigate Russian election interference and Mr. Trump’s “collusion” with it. But when Mr. Mueller’s inconclusive report was released in April 2019, it was an embarrassment to liberals. The politics of law had misdirected their focus for years, and in the process convinced millions of Americans that Mr. Trump’s foes were as prone to conspiratorial thinking as his allies. Cries that Mr. Trump’s opponents were engaged in “lawfare” suddenly gained credibility.
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