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I love the law. I love the way the law divides the actions of our human civilization into categories so that, in every circumstance, we can, with an eye toward justice, make “the punishment fit the crime” as Gilbert and Sullivan put it in The Mikado. Take homicide, for instance. When a death is caused by someone else, it is loosely called a homicide. However, in order to make the punishment proportional to the crime, the law identifies different factors that must be present.
First degree murder, for instance, requires both premeditation and malice aforethought. One must intend to kill, and plan for it. Second degree murder does not require premeditation, but does require intent to kill. In a third category of homicide, cases where the actions of one have led to the death of another, without premeditation or intent, the law uses the concept of reckless endangerment. This category identifies actions that a reasonable person could have seen would possibly lead to the death of another, but which are taken anyway.
Which brings me to the subject of Trump, Musk, and Kennedy. “What’s in a name?” Shakespeare wrote for Juliet, allowing her to rail against the family feud that was keeping her from Romeo. In the case of actions taken by the current administration, whether they set out to kill people or not, reckless endangerment is just another name for murder, and, in their case, mass murder.
The list of victims is growing every day.
Ending the programs funded and staffed by US AID, for example, will predictably result in thousands, potentially millions, of deaths. The loss of vaccine programs, alone, could account for many of them. The feckless Trump administration is moving to terminate more than $1 billion dollars in funding for Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, which vaccinates millions of people each year. Gavi estimates that, since its inception in the year 2000, the vaccines they delivered have saved the lives of 18.8 million children. Goodbye to that.
One US AID internal memo predicts that at least 2-3 million people will die from lack of vaccinations, 166,000 more will die from malaria, there will be 30,000 more new cases of EBOLA and Marburg virus, and 200,000 more children will be paralyzed with polio.
Researchers have recently concluded that the illegal freeze on global AIDS funding has already taken nearly 20,000 lives. A research professor at the Boston University School of Public Health is compiling and posting a continuing estimate of how many more people are likely to die because of the termination of US AID programs. Prof. Brooke Nichols has developed a real-time counter that you can access at impactcounter.com. On it, she estimates that, due to the funding freeze of the PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) program alone, an adult life will be lost every 3 minutes and a child will die every 31 minutes. This is a program which has already saved 26 million lives.
In the last year, the response program to TB averted about 3.65 million deaths. Prof. Nichols estimates there will now be an additional death from TB every seven minutes.
Each of these numbers is a human being.
This is death by reckless endangerment and the White House resident and his gleeful chain-saw dancer are guilty. Any reasonable person would have known…
Add to that the rendition of over 200 young Venezuelans to a cruel and sadistic maximum punishment prison in El Salvador without a trial. Like other banana republic dictators, Trump has ordered them kidnapped and imprisoned on his trumped-up word alone (really fits, doesn’t it?) with no information given or available to their grieving and traumatized families. As was true of the citizens of Brazil and Argentina, we may wake up one morning to news of mass graves and systematic killing. (I strongly recommend, if you haven’t already, that you see I’m Still Here, an important and amazing film. It portrays just one case of thousands that occurred during the abusive and terrifying 1964-1985 Brazilian military dictatorship through the eyes of a woman who saw her husband snatched away one day, and spent decades trying to find out where he had been taken and whether he was alive or dead).
Another of the perpetrators, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the hapless, lying Secretary of HHS, is showing the same reckless disregard for consequences regarding the measles epidemic in Texas, which has now spread to New Mexico and Kansas. On Fox News (of course), he recommended against vaccinations and, instead, extolled the virtues of cod liver oil, which has a large Vitamin A component. Now, Vitamin A does not, in any way, prevent measles, but is only used to supplement body strength for measles patients already in the hospital. Nevertheless, Kennedy’s asinine advice has resulted in a significant increase in measles cases, liver disease from large doses of Vitamin A in the children whose parents took his advice, and, in some instances, death.
Like Trump, in his first term, suggesting bleach as a preventative measure for COVID, Kennedy is the pied piper for parents who innocently follow him to the detriment of their children. Trump, Musk, and Kennedy’s actions are reckless and dangerous. The law may not call it murder. But that’s exactly what it is.
Let’s kill all the lawyers and ease the way to a dictatorship
In the last decade of the 16th century, William Shakespeare wrote and produced a play about the reign of England’s King Henry VI. During Henry’s reign, a rebel named Jack Cade led a band of cutthroats and malcontents, many of them well-to-do, in an attempt to usurp the king and put himself on the throne. After his unsavory henchmen ran amok in London, Jack found that he had neither the people nor the law on his side. In Shakespeare’s play, Cade, in a conversation with one of his henchmen, Dick the Butcher, describes how he will take the throne by making promises of wealth and food for everyone and how he looks forward to being “worshipped as their lord.” Knowing that the law has never been on their side, and, indeed, may interfere, Dick says, “The first thing we do is, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
Controversy over the meaning of this statement continues, robustly, today. Some say it was a critique of the power and influence of lawyers, especially those who used it against the poor. However, the leader of the rebellion of which Dick the Butcher was a part, and his cohorts, were not the poor, but the oligarchy, looking to take over the throne. In their case, just as today, the barrier to illegal power was the law.
Indeed, in a case decided in 1985, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens saw the quotation as a way of praising lawyers, who were the only ones with the ability to go to court and uphold the rightful succession of leadership by preventing a usurpation of the law by force. Stevens maintained that Dick was simply setting out a useful way to rid themselves of an inconvenient barrier to the consolidation of power in a wanna-be autocratic strongman.
Stevens’ take on the line is found in a footnote in his dissenting opinion in Walters v. National Association of Radiation Survivors (1985). He wrote, “As a careful reading of that text will reveal, Shakespeare insightfully realized that disposing of lawyers is a step in the direction of a totalitarian form of government.”
The dissent, in which he was joined by Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, was written in opposition to a majority opinion (6-3) penned by Justice William Rehnquist. The majority voted to uphold a Civil War-era law preventing military veterans from paying lawyers more than $10 to challenge denial of their benefits by the Veterans Administration. Recognizing that, without proper legal representation, such challenges had virtually no chance, Stevens concluded that the “reason for the court’s mistake today is all too obvious. It does not appreciate the value of individual liberty.”
The idea of “killing” the lawyers has found new strength today in our autocratic White House. Among the two hundred executive orders issued by Trump in an effort to govern without interference from the other two branches of government, he issued several orders targeting law firms who had brought cases against him (and won). The order, for example, targeting the Paul Weiss firm read, in part…
“Global law firms have for years played an outsized role in undermining the judicial process and in the destruction of bedrock American principles. Many have engaged in activities that make our communities less safe, increase burdens on local businesses, limit constitutional freedoms, and degrade the quality of American elections. Additionally, they have sometimes done so on behalf of clients, pro bono, or ostensibly ‘for the public good’…My Administration will no longer support taxpayer funds sponsoring such harm.”
The federal government has, for decades, helped to fund non-profit organizations who provide services to those deprived of civil rights, or those who have been treated unfairly by employers, or others who need help “fighting city hall.” These non-profits are often plaintiffs in cases filed against the government, and many so-called “white shoe” national firms with a large presence in DC take these cases pro bono. In addition, the firms also receive payments from many of these as clients, when they are engaged in scuffles with the government.
Under the executive order, the firm’s attorneys’ security clearances were terminated and they were banned from entering federal buildings, stifling their ability to represent clients whose cases require this clearance or access. The order concludes that Paul Weiss “should not have access to our Nation’s secrets nor be deemed responsible stewards of any Federal funds.”
In addition, to carry out this last section, the White House threatened to withhold all federal funding from non-profits represented by the firm. Many of their corporate clients also expressed concern at being represented by a firm at odds with the White House and indicated they may need to seek representation elsewhere. The firm caved to Trump, promising millions in legal services to the president, and sending shock waves through the legal system. Other firms who also were the subject of individual executive orders went to court (imagine that!) and won. What the president had done was blatantly illegal and Paul Weiss, and a few other firms, who also caved, have been widely criticized for choosing their very stuffed pocketbooks over protection of the legal profession.
Indeed, many of us feel strongly that only the courts can save us from a one-branch form of government, subject to the whims of a capricious and vicious king. And to get to court, the first thing we do…is get a lawyer.
Sheila
