“A Washington, D.C.-based bar discipline committee,” Politico reports, recommends that former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani be disbarred for his efforts to steal the 2020 presidential election on Donald Trump’s behalf.  “By prosecuting that destructive case,”  the committee’s report states, “Mr. Giuliani, a sworn officer of the Court, forfeited his right to practice law.”

Meanwhile, another attorney associated with Trump’s attempts to overturn the election results, L. Lin Wood, surrendered his Georgia law license and went into retirement rather than face similar proceedings from that state’s bar association.

While Giuliani and Wood seem to have quite a bit to answer for, and might rightly face court-ordered sanctions for wasting judges’ time with vexatious, malicious, and frivolous litigation, the whole idea of a “license to practice law” is both evil and, historically, un-American.

There’s nothing wrong with “bar associations” as such. Practitioners of many arts, crafts, and occupations join professional organizations, which range in function from membership clubs to mutual aid societies to training and continuing education providers.

But occupational licensing, and especially government-conferred monopolies on such licensing to those professional organizations, deprive individuals of both the right to practice their chosen trades and the right to choose whichever practitioners of those trades meet their needs.

Is it unthinkable for someone who’s not a bar-association-licensed lawyer to represent someone else in court? Not at all.  In fact, New Hampshire’s circuit court rules explicitly provide for “Non-attorney Representatives.”

The US Constitution guarantees those accused of crimes the right to “the assistance of Counsel” for their defense. It says nothing to the effect that said “Counsel” must be a member of a particular club, or have sought, prior to the case, the government’s permission to “practice law.”

Based on their records, I wouldn’t likely choose Giuliani or Wood to represent me in court if my neck was on the line. But it’s my neck, and I should be free to hire the person I deem best qualified to save that neck, no matter what the bar association has to say on the matter.

Similarly, knowing my own limitations, I wouldn’t consider hanging out my shingle as a “lawyer” and offering my services to represent others before a court in matters civil or criminal. But if I was silly enough to do that, and if you were silly enough to take me up on it, the decision should be up to us, not to an association neither of us either belong or have agreed to accept the supervision of. Again, it would be your neck and my reputation — not theirs — on the line.

The theory of law as such is that we’re responsible for our actions. Why should we be robbed of our agency when it comes to defending those actions?

As you may have gathered, I am not an attorney and this column is not intended to constitute legal advice. I’m not sure I legally HAVE to say that, but given the legal profession’s stranglehold on such things, better safe than sorry, right?

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“A violent drug cartel is suspected of leaving a severed human leg found hanging from a pedestrian bridge Wednesday in Toluca, just west of Mexico City,” CBS News reports. “[T]he trunk of the body was left on the street below, near the city’s center, along with handwritten signs signed by the Familia Michoacana cartel.”

Familia Michoacana, which apparently specializes in the production and distribution of methamphetamine, “has become known for carrying out ruthless, bloody ambushes of police in Mexico State and local residents in Guerrero” to protect its lucrative business.

Meanwhile, over the last several months, opportunistic US politicians have used increasing US drug overdose numbers linked to increasing use of fentanyl as an excuse to get an “invade Mexico to fight the cartels” bandwagon rolling.

Given the history of stupid US foreign policy ideas, it seems like it should be incredibly hard to come up with one that out-stupids the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq combined, but with not so much as a “hold my beer” warning, these idiots seem to have managed it.

If any of those past fiascoes could be said to have had any saving graces at all, the main one was that they were conducted far, far away, versus enemies who lacked much ability to bring the war home to America.

Mexico, as you’re no doubt aware,  shares a 2,000-mile border with the US. Millions of people cross that border every year, with or without permission from or even detection by the US government. And the major cartels, as part of their drug distribution operations, already maintain a permanent presence in the US.

Any “war on the cartels” would be fought at least partly on US soil, and it would be fought by the kind of people who don’t quail from things like leaving severed human legs hanging from bridges to send their messages. Do we really want more of that kind of thing here? I have to ask, because sending US troops barging into Mexico is how we get things like that here.

The US government has been fighting — and losing — a “war on drugs” for most of a century now.

That war created the cartels.

That war empowers the cartels.

Expanding that war would unleash the cartels’ most vicious behaviors on US soil, while reducing unsafe drug consumption little if at all.

Legalizing drugs, on the other hand, would devastate the cartels’ profit and loss statements, put production and distribution of substances Americans obviously want into the hands of reputable/peaceable businesses, and reduce overdose deaths and other negative side effects of drug use by bringing standardized dosage and quality to American consumers.

Whose side are the “invade Mexico” demagogues on? Not yours.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

By the time that the United States Supreme Court decided Joseph R. Biden, President of the United States, et al. v. Nebraska, et al. on June 30, it was no longer surprising that a majority Republican Court would side against a Democratic administration in opposing broad executive power to forgive student debt — even if the supposed presidential authority for doing so ultimately descended from a claim by George W. Bush in 2002.

It wasn’t the “‘U.S. Does Whatever It Wants’ plan, which would have permitted the U.S. to take any action it wished anywhere in the world at any time” as explained in The Onion‘s satire.

These days, Democrats are the ones eager to interpret the Higher Education Relief Opportunities For Students (HEROES) Act as granting carte blanche over American campuses, while Republicans like Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett observe that “an instruction to ‘pick up dessert’ is not permission to buy a four-tier wedding cake.”

Initial support for the HEROES Act was bipartisan, so it might seem that the parties of plutocrats and educrats merely drifted back toward their default settings.

Biden frames his case as “providing relief to millions of hard-working Americans” rather than “billions in pandemic-related loans to businesses.” He doesn’t mention It’s a Wonderful Life, but clearly aims to evoke something like the real-life equivalent of the cinematic Bailey Bros. Building & Loan Association lending a hand to the little guys instead of fat-cat Scrooges like “Henry F. Potter, the richest and meanest man in the county.”

Yet just as George Bailey paying him off further enriches Mr. Potter (whose comeuppance had to wait for a 1986 Saturday Night Live skit), subsidized student loans prop up the ever-rising costs that make taking on debt a commonplace prerequisite for college attendance in the first place.

Addressing her nephew’s graduating class of 2006, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote that “it’s too soon to call college a scam, and as long as they teach a few truly enlightening things, like history and number theory, I won’t.”

Half a century earlier, Howard Zinn avoided taking Richard Hofstadter’s history classes at Columbia University after “hearing consistently that Hofstadter was not a particularly good teacher because he was so focused on his writing” (in the words of Zinn biographer Davis Joyce), but was deeply influenced by Hofstadter’s books, especially The American Political Tradition. Aspiring historians can order a copy online for less than 0.1% of the five-figure cost of annual tuition, the postgrad usefulness of which Ehrenreich notes may be confined to knowing how to “pronounce the day’s specials” while waiting tables.

As Dana Carvey’s Bailey asked, “What are we waiting for?”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Never too late to call college a scam” by Joel Schlosberg, Wahpeton, North Dakota Daily News, July 3, 2023
2. “Never too late to call college a scam” by Joel Schlosberg, The Enterprise [Wilson, North Carolina], July 10, 2023
3. “Never Too Late to Call College a Scam” by Joel Schlosberg, Carolina Panorama [Columbia, South Carolina], July 19, 2023
4. “Opinion: Never too late to call college a scam” by Joel Schlosberg, Newton, Iowa Daily News, July 25, 2023