David French

The court doesn't take the easiest cases.

It takes the hardest cases.

And there's both principles that apply and judgment.

This is something that Gorsuch is fond of saying.

At the end of the day, it's very difficult to escape the idea that judges exercise judgment when weighing competing interests.

And so, yeah, inescapably, inescapably in the practice of law, there are subjective elements.

There are a lot of objective elements, but there's also a lot of subjective as well.

And we're just never going to get out of that.

We're not going to have chat GPT running our legal system ever.

Yeah, it's very hard to know exactly what's happening here, but it's very easy to see what the administration is capable of because we've already seen the administration take pretty dramatic unconstitutional action against far less extremist organizations than anything related to or adjacent to or in the neighborhood of Antifa.

So, for example, some of the biggest white shoe law firms in the U.S.

have had extremely punitive actions.

actions taken against them.

Some of the biggest universities in the United States have had punitive action.

Lots of, you know, selective prosecutions of individuals.

So when I read that memo, what I see is the attempt to import

a particular kind of bullying pugilistic approach that was originally related to law firms, individuals, universities, and then sort of expanding that and trying to pull in the NGO world, the world of activist nonprofits, which are harder to reach in many ways than the law firms or the universities because they don't have as many points of contact with the federal government.

You know, a law firm, if you do something to take away security clearances, for example, you're going to cut out the practice of a lot of your lawyers, right?

Or if you do things that prohibit their access to the courts or whatever.

But when it comes to these NGOs, a lot of them, they don't take any government money at all.