The Rule of Law Is Under Attack: Now Is the Time to Stand Up and Speak Out

During the past few months, the Trump Administration has escalated its unprecedented assault on the Rule of Law. This conduct places the foundations of our democracy in jeopardy. We are witnessing a coordinated effort to dismantle constitutional guardrails against abuse, concentrate power in the Executive, and erode the separation of powers among the three branches of government that is central to our Republic.

These attacks include:

• Weaponizing the Justice Department to intimidate and punish perceived political enemies. The indictments of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James are the latest examples. The Comey case was initiated only after Acting U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert, a respected career prosecutor, resigned under pressure for refusing to bring charges due to insufficient evidence. The President then demanded on social media that Attorney General Bondi take action. The President installed Lindsey Halligan, a former personal attorney with no prosecutorial experience, who, over the objection of career prosecutors (some of whom were later summarily dismissed), personally presented the case to the federal grand jury. While she secured a two-count indictment, the grand jury declined to indict on a third count. While there are questions whether the appointment of Halligan was legal as well as whether it even states a crime, the message is chilling: opposition to the President may lead to criminal prosecution. Attorney General James was also indicted by Halligan after Siebert resigned. This indictment alleges mortgage fraud and is apparently based on an investigation into Trump’s perceived political enemies by William Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Investigations of California Senator Adam Schiff and Fulton County Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis continue this pattern of intimidating and punishing perceived political enemies.
• Suppressing free speech by threatening media outlets and entertainers. After late-night host Jimmy Kimmel made comments about the Trump administration following the murder of Charlie Kirk, the Chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) threatened the broadcast licenses of stations airing his show. Kimmel was briefly suspended, but later reinstated after outcry from the public and the entertainment world. Yet the signal from the FCC was clear: If you carry programs or broadcast opinions that the Administration doesn’t like, they will come after you.
• Targeting Universities with loss of federal funding under the guise of combating antisemitism. Nine leading universities were recently asked to sign a “compact” promoting the Administration’s educational, cultural, and political agenda in exchange for receiving funding priority—part of a campaign to punish ideological opposition and suppress academic freedom. The President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) rejected the Administration’s offer on the basis that it would restrict freedom of expression under the First Amendment and the university’s independence as an institution. Other universities have also rejected this offer of signing a “compact” including Brown University, University of Southern California, University of Pennsylvania and University of Virginia.
• Attacking law firms that have (or had) clients or lawyers who have opposed the Administration or the President. This undermines the lawyer’s role in our justice system as an independent, zealous advocate, and chills the representation of unpopular clients.
• Announcing investigations into, and seeking to vilify groups, that support democratic values, civil rights, voting rights, and equal justice under the rule of law.
• Deploying and threatening to deploy the military troops domestically and potentially against U.S. citizens in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. With no demonstrated factual basis to do so, the Administration has sent National Guard troops into cities such as Los Angeles, Memphis, and Washington, D.C., to act as domestic law enforcement. Efforts to send troops into Portland, Oregon and Chicago, Illinois continue and prompted lawsuits against the Administration in both states. Two federal judges in Illinois and Oregon have ruled that there is no basis for such deployments. In unprecedented rhetoric, the President recently proposed using U.S. cities as training grounds for military exercises, with residents presumably viewed as proxies for foreign enemies.
• Bypassing Congress to use military force against other countries, the President unilaterally declared an “armed conflict” with drug cartels primarily from the countries of Venezuela and Mexico. This was the justification, without congressional approval and in apparent violation of both the Constitution and international law, for military strikes in international waters that have killed more than 20 people. The President claims wartime powers to kill individuals without any of the safeguards in place to ensure that they do, in fact, pose a threat to the United States that would justify the use of deadly military force.
• Immigration Enforcement which violates the Constitution by targeting individuals based on the color of their skin, their language, or perceived immigration status, or their speech. As a result, massive violations of basic rights have been committed, including the raiding of, whole apartment complexes in the middle of the night by masked and heavily armed agents with people, including U.S. citizens, being indiscriminately detained without any reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing. The Administration has also used green card and visa revocations to punish lawful residents because of the exercise of their free speech rights under the First Amendment.

These actions are not normal. They are not legal. This is not acceptable.

Each of these actions represents not an isolated abuse, but a broad and systematic campaign to subvert the Rule of Law, free speech, due process, and the separation of powers between the co-equal branches of government. As lawyers who have taken an oath to preserve and protect the Constitution, we are obligated to speak out and stand up to this unprecedented assault on these core principles of American democracy.