HL 196 – Columbia, Schumer & Paul Weiss – To Do and Not To Do

March 31, 2025

Home | Blog | HL 196 – Columbia, Schumer & Paul Weiss – To Do and Not To Do

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.

Brad Karp

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

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.

Katrina Armstrong & Minouche Shafik (both resigned)

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.

4 Comments

  1. Lloyd Constantine

    Mr. Smith you are misinformed on several points. Big Law has not been silent. To date Perkins Coie, Wilmer Hale and Jenner & Block have all gone to court to contest Trump’s blatantly unconstitutional executive orders and so far winning easily. They are receiving amicus curiae support from many other big firms as will be manifest soon in an amicus brief authored by another big firm, Munger Tolles that will be signed by many other big firms.
    On Chuck, who I know some and have testified before more than a dozen times in both houses, as stated, served well for decades but now frequently makes serious errors, This being the most recent. During Trump One, he threatened violence against several SCOTUS justices causing a rare rebuke from the Chief (one of only three times Roberts has done that with the other two for Trump. Last year he called for Israeli voters to oust Bibi – a huge diplomatic no no when an ally in a democracy is involved, regardless whether you like the guy – as I do not. And now this CR and all his sermonizing about it exactly one day after taking the exact opposite position, 24 hours during which nothing changed. On his replacement as leader – if you like older either Whitehouse or Coons and if younger maybe Chris Murphy Williams ‘ 96 (son of Scott Murphy Williams ’69).

    Reply
  2. Nicholas Rostow

    The best statement I know of the lawyer’s role. PW should have abided by it.

    ‘Sir,’ said, Johnson, ‘a lawyer has no business with the justice or injustice of the cause which he undertakes, unless his client asks his opinion, and then he is bound to give it honestly. The justice or injustice of the cause is to be decided by the judge. Consider, sir, what is the purpose of courts of justice? It is, that everyman may have his cause fairly tried, by men apposite to try causes. A lawyer is not to tell what he knows to be a lie: he is not to produce what he knows to be a false deed; but he is not to usurp the province of the jury and the judge, and determine what shall be the effect of evidence,—what shall be the result of legal argument. As it rarely happens that a man is fit to plead his own cause, lawyers are a class of community, who, by study and experience, have acquired the art and power of arranging evidence, and of applying to the points of issue what the law has settled. A lawyer is to do for his client all that his client might fairly do for himself, if he could. If, by a superiority of attention, of knowledge, of skill, and a better method of communication, he has the advantage of his adversary, it an advantage to which he is entitled. If lawyers were to undertake no causes till they were sure they were just, a man might be precluded altogether from a trial of his claim, though were it judicially examined, it might be found a very just claim.’

    — James Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LLD, Sunday, 15 Aug. 1773. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf Everyman’s Library No. 253, 2002), pp. 159-60

    Reply
  3. Eric J Smith

    Welcome back to the fight, Lloyd. I hope that you will make your way to Bryant Park on Saturday for the Hands Off rally that will be held there along with innumerable locations across the country. Taking to the streets in protest is one of our remaining options, just like the good old days when we were in college together during the Vietnam conflict.

    I note that as you added your rhetorical heft to the pile on that is occurring at the expense of Paul Weiss, you failed to note is that ALL of Big Law has been deafeningly silent as Trump takes his revenge against the attorneys who tried to hold him to legal account. Not only is Big Law not speaking up about what is happening, leaving it instead to the bar associations, but according to the New York Times, the other major practices are circling like buzzards around Paul Weiss hoping to poach both clients and the more skilled litigators who might be willing to jump ship. Perhaps a more extensive critique of your profession is in order. Meanwhile my profession of librarianship is doing its best to battle book bans in our local libraries, principled stands that will cost some of my bookish sisters and brothers their jobs.

    As for Leader Schumer, I happened to be watching MSNBC when the senator appeared with Chris Hayes to undergo an adversarial interview about his decision to support the CR. Chuck was hardly using the language of bipartisanship, calling the administration and its Congressional supplicants, “bastards.” He emphasized the point about an unfunded government providing Musk and Trump with carte blanche to thoroughly destroy the infrastructure of much of the federal services upon which we depend, using fiscal exigency as a pretext for actions for which there would be NO recourse through the courts. A budgetary analog to the Reichstag fire that led to Hitler asserting martial powers. (my analogy, not Schumer’s). Schumer said that he was willing to take the heat, to be the fall guy, while not forcing any Democratic senators for vote for the CR and therefore leaving them free to virtue signal by fulminating against their leader. I might agree that it is time for a new Democratic leader in the Senate, but who would that be?? Chris Van Hollen, perhaps.

    OK, now to do my taxes. What are the odds that I will see my refund anytime soon??!!

    Reply
  4. Maggie Sivey

    I’ve never heard of you before, but this is a beautiful and awesome article. Absolutely love it!!
    Very poignant.

    Reply

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