President Trump broadened his campaign of retaliation against lawyers he dislikes with a new memorandum that threatens to use government power to punish any law firms that, in his view, unfairly challenge his administration.
The memorandum directs the heads of the Justice and Homeland Security Departments to “seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable and vexatious litigation against the United States” or in matters that come before federal agencies.
Mr. Trump issued the order late Friday night, after a tumultuous week for the American legal community in which one of the country’s premier firms, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, struck a deal with the White House to spare the company from a punitive decree issued by Mr. Trump the previous week.
Because it was created 250 years ago by a whole bunch of people who seem to have believed that laws would just be enforced via gentlemans’ agreement/honor system and therefore was no need to call for actual consequences for breaking those laws. It just took over 200 years before someone came around and figured out that there weren’t a whole hell of a lot of teeth to those pesky amendments and it was off to the races…