On Monday night, constitutional law professor Alan Dershowitz went on the Newsmax TV program The Record With Greta Van Susteren to promote his new book The Price of Principle: Why Integrity is Worth the Consequences and discuss the situation we are now facing in America: so-called “liberals” who want to intimidate their opponents — including lawyers who represent people the liberals don’t like — rather than engage in civil debate.
According to Dershowitz, the legal profession is on “life support” because of those liberals who are so anti-Trump that they go after Trump’s lawyers. One might recall that during the Democrats’ attempts to impeach President Donald Trump and remove him from office, there was a concerted and conscious effort to intimidate any lawyer who took him on as a client.
“Lawyers today don’t want to get involved in anything related to Donald Trump; I know that from personal experience,” Dershowitz told Van Susteren, the former Fox News host who is now at Newsmax. He said that liberal activists have tried to “ostracize” him on Martha’s Vineyard. He also brought up Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Giuliani has faced harassment from Democratic Party prosecutors, and a man traveled across the country recently with the intention of murdering Kavanaugh.
“Good lawyers want to stay away from this,” Dershowitz said. “They don’t want to be Giuliani’d. They don’t want to be associated. Look, they don’t want to be Kavanaugh’d. They don’t want to have people scream at them while they’re having dinner. I’m being Kavanaugh’d myself on Martha’s Vineyard. Recently, a restaurant that I eat in all the time, the owner said that people have said to her, ‘If you continue to serve Dershowitz, we’re not going to eat here.’ Another friend of mine said he heard that if I was invited to an event, it would be social suicide.”
When Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it was the first time that a law had addressed private discrimination as opposed to legal segregation by a government. At that time, many restaurant owners would have gladly welcomed black customers, but were afraid that some white customers would then refuse to frequent the place. Some proponents of the proposed law argued that if it were the law that they could not discriminate, then potential customers could not blame them.
Regardless of what one thinks of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, self-described liberals have almost uniformly decried discrimination in public accommodations. Apparently, discriminating against the political opponents of progressives is an acceptable exception to that principle.
“I mean, that’s why I wrote The Price of Principle: to tell the story. And what’s happening to me is a microcosm of what’s happening in the United States of America.”
Indeed it is. One might recall that Senator Ted Cruz and his wife have been harassed at a restaurant. So has former Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. More seriously, a left-wing neighbor — a supporter of Senator Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist — viciously attacked Senator Rand Paul, hitting him from behind while Paul was mowing his lawn, breaking the senator’s ribs and damaging his lung. Then, of course, another Senator Sanders supporter tried to murder a Republican member of Congress, who was at a practice preparing for the congressional baseball game.
“We are not operating on principle; we’re operating on partisanship,” Dershowitz continued.
After Van Susteren — who is a lawyer herself — interjected that “even unpopular clients are entitled to a lawyer,” Dershowitz retorted, “You tell that to liberal Democrats these days and members of Congress, including some of my former students, like Jamie Raskin [a Democrat from Maryland]. They will laugh at you.”
Dershowitz conceded that some on the Right used to go after lawyers who worked for left-wing clients, but it is almost always from the Left today. “I fought against it then. I’m going to continue to fight against it even when it’s my people, especially when it’s my people, who are destroying the legal system and the right to counsel.”
Certainly, we have come a long way since the days when John Adams courageously defended the British Redcoats in 1770, contending that every person deserved the representation of counsel. The reason, of course, is that this helps to ensure a fair trial, not only for the defendant, but for society as a whole. After all, there is no benefit to society if innocent people are punished.
But it apparently is now an accepted tenet of those on the Left to use threats of job losses, social ostracism, and even physical harm if someone does not kowtow to the latest progressive cause. This is because the term “liberal” — originally applied to those who believed in “liberty” — is misapplied to those on the progressive Left.
