After Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton legally challenged how several states conducted the 2020 election, dozens of lawyers submitted complaints.
To the state bar.
Their idea: disbar the Republican officeholder for daring to oppose the current Democratic narrative about “election denialism.”
The Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel dismissed those initial complaints as “not demonstrat[ing] Professional Misconduct,” but several attorneys appealed the decision, including a friend of Paxton’s Democratic opponent in the 2022 election for attorney general. The Texas State Board reversed the dismissal. Now a judge has allowed the case against Paxton to go forward.
The threat of disbarment is increasingly being wielded as an ideological weapon and without regard to whether targeted individuals have committed any wrongdoing worthy of disbarment. It’s the lawyers’ version of cancel culture.
This is demonstrated in a lengthy report by Margot Cleveland in The Federalist, who details many other instances as well as Paxton’s.
These include the DC Bar’s pursuit of former Assistant Attorney General Jeff Clark and the California Bar’s pursuit of John Eastman, among a “barrage of politicized bar complaints pursued against Republican lawyers who provided legal advice or litigated various issues in the aftermath of the November 2020 general election.”
The purpose, then, is not to combat corruption but to corruptly intimidate any lawyers inclined to represent Republicans in challenges of dubious election results. One malefactor is a group called 65 Project, targeting more than a hundred Republican-aligned attorneys but no Democrat-aligned attorneys. Seems partisan.
Should lawyers who seek to disbar lawyers solely because of political disagreements be disbarred themselves?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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7 replies on “Disbar the Disbarrers?”
Some years ago, I thought that the United States was, despite its many and great flaws, something better than a banana republic.
But the would-be single party of a single-party state has shown me how little remains liberal of our once liberal republic.
Granted that these various measures to silence their opponents will likely fail; still, that the censors think that they may succeed, that they do not fear the repercussions, and that we cannot be perfectly sure that they will fail shows how far our political order has descended.
Disclaimer: In my opinion, one should not need a “license” or the permission of “the bar” to practice law.
That said, it seems reasonable that when a lawyer abuses the legal system with frivolous/vexatious “lawfare” litigation as Paxton did vis a vis the 2020 election, professional associations might want to punish that conduct by measures up to and including expulsion.
Who gets to decide what complaint is ‘frivolous/vexatious “lawfare” litigation”?
It’s a fact that some states used executive orders to change rules for the 2020 election, when the Constitution reserves that right to members of the state legislature. Should that have been ignored?
There are two sides to every story.
The DC Bar exists like the Congressional Oversight Committee where something historically corrupt becomes publicized and they need to throw a bag over it before too much attention is paid lest the corruption need to be abandoned and new methods instituted.
No, but the complainants should be made to pay all of the costs of the disciplinary boards and Courts as well as the actual costs of defense if unsucessful
This tactic has been around for decades and involves other Professions. I am a licensed Professional Engineer who wrote a paper that criticized Denver’s Regional Transportation District’s plan for light rail transit. The proponents began attacking my professional credentials as well as my co-author’s professional credentials. My co-author, who is well-known in the term limits movement apparently threatened them with a libel lawsuit, which we would have won, and the idiots backed off.
Texas charity that backs Trump’s stolen-election lie has deep ties to Ken Paxton
“The Texas attorney general would be the one to hold True the Vote accountable on allegations that it swindled a $2.5 million donor. But the nonprofit’s founder has been a friend and an ally.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is pretty familiar with Catherine Engelbrecht. He’s been a guest on her podcast, chatting about their shared passion: rooting out voter fraud. They both have gone to great lengths to try to support former President Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen.
And when Engelbrecht, founder of the nonprofit True the Vote, has found herself in hot water, Paxton’s office has turned out to be a helpful ally.
Most recently, a state judge sided with Engelbrecht’s argument that it should be Paxton’s office — not a court — that should probe allegations made by a True the Vote donor who says he was swindled out of $2.5 million.“