Before James Carville admonished moderates, liberals and those further left to lay low and allow Trump and the second coming of his cult to destroy themselves, Hopelessly Liberal had adopted that modus operandi.  Our last post was on January 6.  Several years from now it may seem these hibernations were wise.  Right now that seems wildly optimistic.

Vacations from activism and action must end.  During this quiescence there were many examples of ineffective responses to Trump, what not to dos.  Let’s look at three, Columbia University, Senator Chuck Schumer and law firm, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, not merely to pile on – though they deserve that – but because their conduct and cowardice points to an answer to the question of what to do?

Paul Weiss is and has been for at least a half-century top five of big American law firms.  Chronicling its accomplishments, commercial, public interest and distinguished alumni could easily fill several volumes.  I’ve lost attorneys to Paul Weiss and hired some away from it, including one who went on to become governor.  As I write, my law firm opposes a Paul Weiss client in a huge case where their lead partner is our most skillful adversary.  Paul Weiss alum, Lew Kaplan, among the smartest and most articulate litigators ever encountered, is the federal judge who calmly but forcefully handled Trump in the two E. Jean Carrol defamation cases against him.  And I think it is the unmentioned Kaplan far more than the frequently targeted Paul Weiss alum Mark Pomerantz that really got under Trump’s thin orange skin.

Relevant to Trump’s false claim that Paul Weiss refuses representation to right wing causes, a claim both irrelevant and false, the firm skillfully defended Spiro Agnew.  Who until just now was widely considered America’s worst Vice-President.  In getting Agnew to resign and cop a plea to a trivial and non-existent crime, instead of the scores of serious crimes he actually committed, America was spared the disaster of an Agnew presidency when Nixon resigned less than ten months later.

With all that past and current glory and the talent and money necessary to stand firm (as others including Perkins Coie and Jenner & Block have) Paul Weiss quickly capitulated to Trump’s clearly illegal and unconstitutional Executive Order, restricting their and clients’ access to federal facilities and threatening their federal contracts.  For doing what lawyers must do, zealously and ethically lawyering the cases and causes of clients that retain them.

In an early morning Oval Office meeting, Brad Karp, Paul Weiss’ Chair, agreed to provide $40 million of legal representation to Trump-designated causes and also agreed (or not) to end DEI practices at the firm and condemned (or didn’t) its’ alum, Mark Pomerantz for things he did after leaving Paul Weiss.  Those last two are things Karp now claims he did not agree to and spotlights the worst part of his surrender.  Because Trump is not merely a liar but endlessly streams lies, surrounding the most trivial and mundane pronouncements with falsity.  When Paul Weiss surrendered and abandoned their principals and dignity, they knew Trump would lie about the deal.  Maybe both Trump and Paul Weiss are lying.

Chuck Schumer, who is not a coward, nevertheless capitulated to Trump, to Majority Leader Thune and to Speaker Johnson in helping pass the continuing resolution that allows the government to stay funded while Trump and Musk destroy and disfigure it and selectively and unconstitutionally withhold the very funding that the “CR” usefully provides to Americans and the planet.  Chuck’s rationalization is that the alternative was “ten times worse” than the “terrible” CR he facilitated.

He reasons that in a defunded government Trump would fund only what he wanted, and his dismantling of the rest would have been greatly accelerated.  Chuck’s reasoning is wrong on two counts.  First, he reasons that by retarding the pace of Trump’s march through Georgia, the plantation may be saved.  If anything, the pace of Trump’s assault has increased since that CR was enacted.

He also reasons that bipartisan collaboration on this CR was the way to go.  That was collaboration in the style of Marshall Pétain and Neville Chamberlain, a comparison that seemed silly until the last 70 days, but now resonates in many quarters including here at HL.

And what of King’s College?  A school where I earned a law degree and departed before getting another degree from a faculty housed in the same building as its Middle Eastern Studies Department.  One of Trump’s primary targets in the executive order that pulled $400 million in federal funding from what is now called Columbia University.

It is a school which as King’s awarded Alexander Hamilton his baccalaureate and as Columbia did the same for Barack Obama.  An institution whose law school educated both Presidents Roosevelt and provided most of the “Brain Trust” for the “New Deal” and FDR’s presidency, unparalleled in length and achievement.

A school that reported its endowment as $14.8 billion last September, so wealthy enough to fight, but instead quickly capitulated to Trump’s demands.  But Columbia unlike Paul Weiss didn’t even get a commitment to drop the penalties in the Executive Order, but instead an implicit commitment from Trump to continue torturing and playing with its educational mission.

Let’s start by saying that the blunderbuss withdrawal of $400 million from Columbia faculties as diverse as Middle Eastern Studies, Dentistry and the Creative Writing MFA, where my novelist son earned a degree, is not merely illegal but silly.

Some really bad shit has happened at Columbia.  I know this from reliable reporting and from watching it with my own eyes.  Jewish students, among others, have been subjected to a hostile environment that would have launched a thousand ACLU and INC Fund lawsuits had African American or myriad other religious, national, ethnic or racial groups been subjected to a similarly hostile environment. Some of that hostility involves campus safety, with Columbia utilizing a false distinction among speech, physical threats and actual violence.

This false and fictional distinction was chanted by the Harvard, MIT and Penn presidents on December 5, 2023 to a House committee, in apparent ignorance of settled SCOTUS precedent holding that when speech incites “imminent lawless action” it is not protected by the First Amendment and can be prohibited and punished.

From Columbia’s cramped campus, you, me and the whole world watched advocacy of violence followed swiftly by actual violence – a Columbia tradition that I witnessed when I was a student there.  That part of the hostile environment must be fixed.  And some of the hostile environment is in the Middle Eastern Studies and other departments.  But that hostility, often accompanied by skewed and shoddy scholarship, is not merely lawful but the type of hostility that must be protected from government interference at centers of higher learning.

That hostility can be criticized.  It can be countered with opposing teaching and scholarship.  It can be debated, as I informally debated Columbia Professor Edward Said (a member of the Palestinian National Council and author of “The Question of Palestine”) at a law school event in 1971.  But what can’t be, but was just done by Columbia, is agree to put an academic department like Middle Eastern Studies into de facto receivership with a special provost overseeing while the federal government tacitly but clearly participates in that supervision.

Columbia, Schumer and Paul Weiss have shown us what not to do and unintentionally demonstrated what must be done.  The opposite of what they did.  The university and the law firm are rich with lawyers and money (if not guns) and know the way to court where they could and should have fought Trump and highly likely won.  Not without pain and suffering along the way, but avoiding the far greater damage to themselves and the nation that their cowardly conduct may help produce.

For Schumer, who has served the nation well, it is time to step aside for someone willing to fight, resist, and obstruct every filthy, illegal and unconstitutional action by the criminal that inhabits the Whitehouse.