First Principles

"I'm just a Conservative. Your modern profligate and hedonistic ways frighten and confuse me. But I do know this. A federal law that claims it has the power to make every American eat his or her broccoli - and therefore respects no limit to government power at all - is clearly Unconstitutional."

Bruce Feher shared a post today accusing the Democrats of being “The Lawyer’s Party.”  That’s not necessarily wrong, and there is much to criticize in a litigious and over-regulated society.  But the post goes further and attacks the profession generally.  While even I appreciate a good lawyer joke (and believe me, I’ve heard them all), I think the post rather misses the mark here, and repeats a mistake Republicans have been making for years – at the expense of Conservatism itself.

The problem isn’t too many lawyers in government, it’s that there are too many LIBERAL lawyers.

Republicans ignored the critical nature of the legal system, and by extension the Judiciary, for far too long.  To a large extent, they still do.  And what happens when you have otherwise solid Republicans ignorant of the importance of a strong conservative judiciary?  You get O’Connor, Kennedy, Souter, Stevens, Brennan, and Warren – not to mention legions of far more radical lower court judges who do the vast majority of the precedent setting in this country.  And if it weren’t for groups like the Federalist Society (I’ve been a proud member since my law school days) recognizing the need to fight fire with fire, it’s most doubtful that we’d have the more conservative judges we have now.

The tools of governance are statutes.  I want warriors on my side trained in the use of those tools.  In Nevada in this last legislative session, we were VERY lucky that both lawyers in the state Senate (Michael Roberson and Greg Brower) were strong, solid conservatives.

Liberalism generally – the idea that we can forcibly engineer a utopia at the expense of messy and inefficient individual liberty – is the problem, not one profession or another.  Gratuitous insults to the entire profession (while too often understandable) merely serve to keep badly needed conservative attorneys underground (believe me, they’re under siege enough from the first day they start law school) or out of the profession altogether.  And doing that gives free rein to the progressives to interpret the Constitution, as well as federal and state statutes, in horribly destructive ways.

And to be clear, I’m not offended – far from it!  One doesn’t go to law school in Seattle without witnessing some truly frightening abuses of the English language in order to justify some serious intrusions on individual rights.  The post makes a very good point that I’ve made for years, and that’s that lawyers tend to be liberal because they use the power of government to solve problems, and therefore are perfectly happy with robust and all-encompassing government power.

But many of the tools of government, like the Constitution itself, are there to be used to protect our liberties as well.  Those tools only work, however, if you know how to use them.  When you have hordes of lawyers on the wrong side of liberty, you need to have a couple fighting for you, too.  Without that, we’d have no suit against Obamacare, no DC v. Heller (affirming that the 2nd Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms), and a neutered First Amendment.

Lawyers like to joke that everyone hates us ’til they need us.  In these times, Conservatism definitely needs a few more defenders in the courtroom, in our legislatures, and on the bench.