‘First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All the Lawyers!’

January 4, 2024 by Joe Herring

Shakespeare famously wrote, “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”  This startling suggestion is offered by the character “Dick the Butcher” in Shakespeare’s play, Henry VI, Part II.

Often considered a somewhat tongue-in-cheek criticism of self-interested or otherwise morally compromised practitioners within the legal profession, it has since entered the lexicon of Western societies as shorthand for the upending of the law by those charged with safeguarding it.

The United States was once thought immune to such anti-liberty chicanery — at least as immune as any society comprising fallible human beings can be — but recent decades have shown us to be as vulnerable as Achilles.

Politicians have long behaved badly but were heretofore sufficiently self-conscious to still perform a sort of “constitutional fan dance” to at least present a fig leaf of legitimacy to obscure their rapacious behavior.

Sadly, that façade became obsolete with the wholesale loss of media objectivity, at least as far as Democrats were concerned.  Traceable to the campaign of one William Jefferson Clinton, the major media ran interference for the missteps and criminality of his subsequent administration, refusing to adequately investigate obvious avenues of corruption and malfeasance.

In the years between then and now, that dynamic has only advanced, never diminished.

However, while the playing field had been deeply slanted in favor of the political left, the loyal opposition have found themselves under even greater scrutiny as countless journalists with lots of time on their hands, and a perpetually dull axe to grind, focused the entirety of their efforts on only one side of the aisle.

This terrible, immoral poisoning of our body politic accelerated dramatically under the direction of Barack Obama, shielded, like Clinton before him, by a media that was by turns studiously incurious and stridently activist.

Both modes ensured that the American people would face nearly insurmountable obstacles in holding the left accountable for running roughshod over our rights.

The brazen corruption and anti-constitutional behavior that are the hallmarks of Biden’s tenure have set a new standard for ruling hubris.  Democrats now openly govern with a mafioso’s attitude of “whatcha gonna do ’bout it?”

In this fertile totalitarian soil have sprouted the mechanisms and processes that, once matured, will finally rid the left of any need for pretextual fig leaves, either constitutional or moral.

This isn’t new ground.  Hearkening back to the lawyers Dick the Butcher wanted to exterminate, the path to perdition has long wound dizzyingly among dense thickets of willfully misinterpreted and misapplied laws, along with brazen lawlessness.

Tyrants routinely appeal to the population’s desire to “restore” this or that characteristic of the government or society by passing illegitimate, unlawful legislation under the guise of setting things right.

Think the Nuremburg Laws of the 1930s in Germany, where Jewish residents were stripped of citizenship, ownership of assets, and ultimately, of their status as human beings was sold as a necessary step in returning Germany to pre-WWI greatness.

It is a rare instance indeed that sees government trampling rights underfoot without having a “law” or regulation to wave before those who oppose their usurpations.

In Poland right now, there is underway just such an attempt to reorder society and government to better suit the authoritarian left.  There is a strong push within the European Union to gain veto power over any act of a member-nation, an essential precursor to transitioning to a single European government.

Poland is a parliamentary republic and as such has a president and a prime minister.  Following the recent election, these two offices are now filled by men diametrically opposed to each other’s politics.

The new arrival, Prime Minister Donald Tusk, is an unapologetic advocate of further enmeshment with the E.U., to the point of ceding Polish sovereignty to the European Parliament and judicial system.  This is no tentative first step, but a bold leap toward administrative totalitarianism.

He is opposed by the president of the Republic of Poland, Andrzej Duda, who has rightfully challenged Tusk’s administrative coup.  Duda has pointed out that Tusk’s citing of European Court judgements as legal justification for ignoring the unambiguous language of the Polish constitution carries no weight of law in Poland.

To facilitate this takeover, Tusk and his cronies have declared the supreme judiciary of Poland to be illegitimately appointed — again, based on the application of European Union judicial decisions that have no force in Poland.

Tusk’s minister of justice and attorney general, Adam Bodnar, issued a decree demanding the replacement of said judges and the nullification of their rulings made since 2018.

Here in the U.S., Democrats engage in lawfare using left-leaning activist judges who routinely issue rulings made out of whole cloth that, unsurprisingly, always advance the leftist “cause.”  Poland hasn’t had the opportunity to pollute the courts with puppets as leftists in the U.S. have done, so they are attempting to do so in one fell swoop under the guise of setting things right.

Claiming to be “restoring the rule of law,” the new Polish government is instead ruling in an entirely unlawful manner it describes as a necessary “transitory period.”

According to an interview given by Bodnar, in practice, the transitory period will require the new government to deviate from the normal principles of a law-abiding and democratic state by undertaking actions without legal grounds.

According to an in-depth exposition by Polish legal foundation Ordo Iuris, included among these “deviations” is the use of violence, as evidenced by the violent assault of one member of Parliament who rose to defend Polish public media, the primary broadcast medium made an early target of the new regime seeking to control the narrative.

Bodnar and Tusk admit they will be forced to take “subversive actions,” including undermining the constitution in order to “save it.”

Astute observers will notice the parallels between the behavior of Polish and European leftists and our homegrown American ones.

The many spurious challenges to existing election law crafted to advantage Democrat candidates (and preserve avenues for perpetrating fraud) offers a perfect example of the very activities that prompted Dick the Butcher to offer his prescription for ridding society of dangerous malcontents.

Obviously, our American circumstance would not be well served by following old Dick’s advice, but recalling his reasons may prompt us to forestall the damage to a republic that comes from permitting “transitory periods,” such as one that might be described using the words “fundamental transformation.”

Presently, America’s governments at all levels are pursuing this lawlessness in a largely de facto fashion, but should the left succeed in doing so with no meaningful resistance, like Poland, and Nazi Germany before it, the lawlessness will quickly become de jure.

No one in his right mind wants to live in a world where standing against lawlessness is treated as lawlessness.  The destruction of the legitimacy of law is necessary for tyranny to take hold, and the attempt to do so, whether in Eastern Europe or the United States, should trigger a harsh and vigorous response from the people.

We need not resort to following Dick the Butcher’s exhortation, but should we continue pretending the left has our best interest in mind, we’ll discover too late the lethal result of our error.

Mr. Herring is a writer and broadcaster based in Omaha, Nebraska and welcomes visitors to his website, www.dailyherring.com.