“No one is above the law” is a bit of thick BS that usually comes from the mouth or pen of a person of malign intent whose goal is to deprive others of their liberty or property. Unspoken is their self-exemption from the principle which seems to have no real use save as a cudgel.
Consider the inculpatory clauses of this weapon clothed in the vainglorious boasts of those of small repute – lawyers to be redundant. Ignorance of the law is said to be no excuse for failing to observe it. Of course, everybody is ignorant of the law the complexity and volume of which is beyond the capacity of the yet to be built 8-exaFLOP Condor Galaxy 3 supercomputer. Everything about the rule of law favors those who administer it. Justice is blind for a reason. Lawyers for the state don’t have to know the rules, just the ones they feel like enforcing. They have unlimited budgets that can be used against the poor soul who incurs their displeasure.
There are thousands of prosecutors charged with the administration of laws and rules beyond counting that only can be administered by the application of prosecutorial discretion – another way of defining those who are and are not above the law. Friends or allies are topside while foes are below decks.
The power to indiscriminately prosecute or forgo it is an application of corruption almost impossible for someone with a law degree to resist. Good behavior seems to be a feature more prevalent in bonobos than in humans who’ve gone to law school. When ethical lapse is coupled with judicial force majeure the laws of chaos assume the garb of civil life.
Three legal malfeasances relatively new to America have assumed ugly positions in just an historical blink – pernicious lawsuits designed to entangle and impoverish, lawfare, and the failure to impartially enforce the law. Civil redress to wrongs imposed on an individual or group by another individual or group is an essential feature of an honest justice system – assuming such is possible. Yet frivolous suits endure while serious ones are dismissed by lazy or fearful judges under the fiction of lack of standing. There is no prompt remedy for a bad judge. Given the density of judges throughout the country, there is a surety of numerous judicial bad actors. The ramshackle state of the courts allows the repetition of Jarndyce and Jarndyce endlessly to the enrichment of the profession and the impoverishment of its clients.
Amendment VIII of the Constitution forbids excessive fines, yet the courts seem oblivious of its mandate, and preposterous levies are made without recourse or consequence. The proper fate of lawyers remains just a well quoted phrase in a minor Shakespeare play.
Lawfare is common beyond our borders, but as we no longer have borders, it has also become a defining feature of political warfare in our country as in the rest of the uncivilized world. As a pernicious weapon, it is just getting started.
A first cousin of lawfare is unlawfare – the unwillingness of prosecutors to enforce the law because they identify more with the perpetrators than the victims. The failure to enforce the law because of bias has become another common feature of American government. It’s an unwelcome development that has no obvious palliative.
The USA is almost 250 years old. It has operated under the same rules for virtually all of its history. The manipulation of law and the aggressiveness of lawyers is nothing new. So why has the misapplication of the playbook suddenly come to the fore to an extent not seen previously? The answer is that a (poorly) educated class has arisen which thinks it has solved some of the most persistent human problems. Namely, how to organize society from the stratosphere down, thus ensuring that those with a soupçon of blurred insight are allowed to impose order on a majority of their less “enlightened” inferiors. These infra dig denizens are often inattentive and allow their liberty to be curtailed without notice until it is irretrievably lost.
The compulsion to tell others how to live their lives is frequently irresistible. Equally compelling is bending the rules. The vast majority of those who believe in their superior perspective are themselves victims of societal twisting by a small class of possessed meddlers. These schemers see themselves as the eventual keepers of the combinations of all the locks with which they will imprison their gullible followers. Followers who are too dumb to realize they are being led, much less to what end.
Those who cavort with law and lawyers often have little insight into the game they are playing. They seem to wish to conjure a system of governance that is a chimera – one part lawyer, one part intellectual, and the hindmost part made of applesauce. Vast galaxies of empty brain matter are committed to the task of replacing that which has worked with tardive dyskinesia.
Reason and compromise are baubles to lawyers and prosecutors with putty brains. If the law is an ass, a clown is astride it. Never has an age claimed so much sophistication when encased in naïveté. The law of the land seems difficult to differentiate from a car full of clowns
