Have you ever watched a legal fight and thought the paperwork mattered more than the verdict? I have. More than once. The complaint arrives, the calendar fills, the invoices start, and long before a judge says a word the target is already paying in time, money, and reputation. That is the part of modern politics that rarely makes a clean headline, yet it may be doing more work than the speeches.
When Legal Process Becomes Political Power
Call it lawfare if you want a blunt word. I prefer to think of it as the conversion of procedure into leverage. A filing does not have to win to work. It only has to last. It only has to follow a lawyer from one jurisdiction to another. It only has to make the next client wonder whether this advocate is worth the heat.
In my experience, people on the Right still talk about these cases as if they were ordinary disputes. One brief. One hearing. One appeal. That framing is tidy. It is also incomplete. A discrete lawsuit is a contest. A coordinated campaign is a system. Systems do not care whether you were polite last Tuesday.
The argument now circulating among some conservative writers is simple enough. Formal neutrality in the courts is not the same thing as equal capacity to fight. One side has built institutions, donor networks, complaint mills, and professional pressure. The other side has mostly tried to dodge the next punch. That imbalance does not stay academic for long.
Two Moral Orders, One Set Of Courts
The deeper claim underneath the legal tactics is cultural. One camp organizes around group outcome equality. The other organizes around individual merit. You can dislike that pairing. You can call it overstated. But the practical point is hard to wave away. Admissions, hiring, contracting, and even professional discipline start to look different once you decide which principle sits on top.
A society can pretend to run both at once. It cannot do so cleanly. College seats, government posts, and law licenses are not infinite. If one standard is group representation and the other is individual performance, somebody loses the tie. Courts then become the place where the tie is broken. That is why so much policy now arrives wearing a robe.
If the fight is between two incompatible moral orders, peacetime manners become a strategy error.
I do not love wartime language. It inflates everything. Still, the people using it are trying to describe a refusal to split the difference. You cannot admit applicants by both strict test scores and rigid group quotas without one rule swallowing the other. Once that is admitted, the legal battlefield stops looking like a series of misunderstandings.
What Lawfare Actually Does To A Lawyer
Forget the slogans for a minute. Watch the mechanics. An ethics complaint can follow a lawyer for years. Travel can be restricted. A license can hang in limbo. White-shoe firms may decline the file. Family life gets ugly in ways that never appear in a docket sheet. None of that requires a final judgment against the target.
A loss in court can still be a win in politics. Fees climb. Insurers get nervous. Future clients ask quieter questions. Colleagues start to treat the lawyer as radioactive. I have found that reputational damage travels faster than any appellate briefing schedule.
- Complaints can be copied across states even when facts barely change.
- Mobilized signatories can turn a niche ethics fight into a public ritual.
- Multiple investigations can run at once, draining the same defense budget.
- A leaked draft or unused letter can become the entire story.
- Even a later vindication may arrive after the career has already bent.
That last point is the one civilians miss. Legal time is not the same as political time. By the time a board or a court finishes its work, the intended audience has already updated its priors. The deterrent effect is the product.
The 65 Project As A Template, Not A Mystery
One organized effort became a kind of case study. It began with a target list of conservative and Republican lawyers and then expanded. The public aim, as described by its own architects, was not only to file grievances. It was to make certain advocates toxic. Livelihoods were part of the design. Deterrence was the point.
Names on advisory boards matter less than the method. High-status legal figures, former officials, and professional association veterans give a campaign an air of ordinary ethics enforcement. The filings then look like housekeeping. They are not always housekeeping. Sometimes they are occupancy.
Dozens of lawyers across many states and the District of Columbia have been pulled into this orbit. Scores of bar complaints have been logged. Not every case produces a trophy. That is almost beside the point. The process itself teaches younger lawyers a lesson: some files are too expensive to touch.
Rudy Giuliani, Kenneth Chesebro, and John Eastman have each faced disbarment outcomes. Jenna Ellis took a multi-year suspension. Jeff Clark has spent years defending his license after a draft letter that was never sent became the center of a political storm. You can agree or disagree with their 2020 theories. The structural question remains. If controversial representation becomes a professional death sentence, who is left to argue the hard cases?
Eastman’s File And The Cost Of Being The Example
Eastman’s disbarment fight has become the loudest warning shot. Defense costs in the millions are not a rounding error for a constitutional scholar. Court orders that squeeze travel, firearms rights, and even routine identification renewals add a layer of civic inconvenience on top of the professional one. The message is not subtle. If they can do this to him, they can do this to you.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect is who declined to take the appeal. Some well-known conservative lawyers stayed away. Fear of financial or reputational blowback is not imaginary. I get the caution. I also think caution, repeated often enough, becomes a habit that hollows out a movement.
Lawyers must not be systematically discouraged from taking difficult and controversial cases.
Jay Sekulow and the American Center for Law and Justice eventually stepped in. That matters. So would an amicus brief from the Justice Department, if one ever arrives. State disbarment cases are not the Supreme Court’s usual diet. Discretionary review still exists. The argument for taking such a case is not that every ethics fight belongs in Washington. It is that partisan use of the license can corrode the idea of fearless advocacy.
Money Changes The Texture Of A Fight
Funding figures in this space are slippery, but the direction of travel is not. Organized left-of-center legal campaigns have raised sums in the hundreds of millions in a single year, according to the essay that set off this discussion. Even if you shave the number, the capacity gap remains. Thousands of people can be mobilized to sign a single ethics complaint. In New York, thousands were lined up against Giuliani alone.
Coordination across jurisdictions is the force multiplier. One lawyer, several boards, overlapping calendars. That is not a fair fight in the colloquial sense. It may still be a lawful fight. Those are different sentences.
| Pressure Tool | Immediate Cost | Longer Effect |
| Bar complaint | Counsel fees, time | License risk, stigma |
| Civil lawsuit | Discovery burden | Insurance and client flight |
| Criminal inquiry | Personal exposure | Family and travel strain |
| Media amplification | Reputation hit | Fewer elite firms will touch the file |
Look at that table and you can see why defense-only strategies feel noble and still fail. Defense answers the last filing. It does not raise the price of the next one.
Jeff Clark’s Path From Target To Builder
Jeff Clark is being asked to lead a new public-interest shop precisely because he has lived inside the machine. His concern about late changes to election rules, mail balloting, and signature practices was shared by millions of voters, whether or not every claim later held up. He drafted a letter to Georgia legislators. The letter was not sent. Colleagues threatened resignation. The draft leaked. Then came a local prosecution, years of federal attention as an unindicted figure in a January 6 narrative, three congressional investigations, and a grinding D.C. bar fight.
The current Justice Department later sued D.C. judicial and bar officials, arguing they lacked authority to keep harassing him. Reasonable people can debate that filing. What is harder to debate is the asymmetry. A never-sent letter produced a five-year professional war. That is process as punishment, or at least process as occupation.
Clark’s earlier record is not a rumor. At the Justice Department’s Environment Division he won a large share of his cases, including a fight over a federal judge’s attempt to steer national energy policy from Oregon. When he later ran the Civil Division, he personally argued and won a majority of his arguments while overseeing a thousand-lawyer shop. You can dislike his politics and still notice the résumé. Movements that want courtroom capacity usually want people who have already tried hard cases.
Why Defense Alone Keeps Losing Altitude
Conservative legal groups have spent years protecting their own after the fact. That work is honorable. It is also incomplete. Leaving lawyers to self-fund seven-figure defenses is a quiet way of telling the next generation to pick safer clients.
There is another design flaw. Much of the conservative public-interest world still behaves like a high-hourly boutique. Clients get billed. Matters get scoped. The meter runs. An offensive campaign against coordinated lawfare does not look like that. It looks more like a purpose-built firm with several disciplines under one roof, willing to seek damages, fees, and professional consequences when the other side overreaches.
- Identify the institutions that convert complaints into careers.
- Fund defense so targets are not isolated one by one.
- File countersuits and fee petitions that change the expected value of the next attack.
- Document conflicts, leaks, and process abuse in public, not only in sealed annexes.
- Recruit advocates who will take the ugly files before the ugly files become unthinkable.
None of that requires cartoon villainy. It requires treating lawfare as a market. Raise the cost, and some of the supply disappears. Leave the cost near zero, and the supply grows.
Project Oversight And The Logic Of Counterpressure
The new firm described in the original essay is being framed as offensive on purpose. Details are being kept thin, which is either prudence or marketing. The stated minimum is clear enough. Seek damages. Seek fees. Make the campaign expensive. When necessary, put careers and reputations on the other side of the ledger into question.
That last sentence will make some readers flinch. Good. It should. Tit-for-tat ethics warfare can rot a profession. The counterargument is that unilateral restraint already has. If only one network uses the disciplinary machinery as a political tool, the machinery stops being neutral in practice even if the statute books still sound even-handed.
I’ve found that people who work inside institutions hate this conclusion. They want the robes to remain above the mess. Fair. I want that too. Wanting it does not make it so. Institutions are staffed by people with donors, conferences, and career paths. Pretending otherwise is a kind of civics cosplay.
Rule Of Law Or One-Party Advocacy?
Here is the uncomfortable claim. Because so much American policy is now made in courtrooms, a monopoly on elite advocacy is a monopoly on policy development. Destroy the pool of opposing counsel and you do not need to win every election. You only need to win the staffing of the briefs.
Judicial resolution depends on advocates who will show up. If one side can make showing up professionally lethal, the field tilts. I do not think every bar complaint is a conspiracy. Plenty of lawyers deserve discipline. The issue is pattern, funding, and intent. A pattern that aims to “kill the pool of legal talent” is not a random ethics surge.
Is an adversarial legal order still adversarial when one faction commands the money, the associations, the complaint infrastructure, and much of the prestige press that narrates the filings? Formal rules can stay intact while the living practice changes. That is how systems drift.
What Recovery Would Even Mean
Resistance is easier to brand than reconstruction. Conservatives have gotten decent at naming what they oppose. They are fuzzier about which institutions they want back, which ones they want to shrink, and which incentives they want to break. Lawfare is a useful test of that fog.
Do you want bar authorities that stay boring and technical? Then you need counsel willing to challenge politicized complaints early, not after a license is already gone. Do you want elite firms to take controversial conservative clients again? Then somebody has to socialize the risk. Do you want election litigation to remain possible without career suicide? Then the price of filing a grievance as a political hobby has to rise.
A rough map of priorities: Defend the lawyers already in the blast radius Build a firm that can go first instead of last Raise the expected cost of abusive process Recapture professional forums that set the tone Keep the courts actually two-sided
That list is not poetry. It is a staffing plan. Movements that cannot staff their own defense end up renting morals from people who do not share them.
The Human Weather Around These Cases
It is easy to talk about doctrine and forget the household. A lawyer under multi-front investigation misses recitals, burns savings, and starts measuring friendships by who still answers the phone. Mark Meadows, to take one public example, spent enormous sums defending himself across congressional, federal, and state tracks. That is not a lifestyle brand. That is attrition.
Families split under that weather. I have watched milder versions of it in ordinary commercial cases. Multiply the cameras and the ideology and the strain is obvious. Anyone who treats that as a rounding error is not thinking like a person. They are thinking like a faction.
Does that mean every target is a hero? Of course not. Some 2020 theories were sloppy. Some courtroom performances were worse than sloppy. Professional standards exist for a reason. The question is whether those standards are being applied as law or as a filter for permissible politics.
A Note On Fairness Without Naivete
Readers on the Left will say turnabout is not justice. They will say January 6, false electors, and pressure campaigns against local officials were not seminar hypotheticals. They will say discipline followed conduct. Sometimes that is true. Sometimes the ratio of punishment to conduct looks theatrical.
Readers on the Right will say the other side has been lawfaring for a decade and then lectures about norms. Also sometimes true. The grown-up move is to separate three piles: genuine misconduct, aggressive but lawful advocacy, and process used as a weapon. Mixing the piles is how propaganda works.
I keep coming back to a plain test. Would the same complaint, with the facts reversed and the party labels swapped, have been filed with the same urgency? If the honest answer is no, you are not looking at a hygiene campaign. You are looking at selection.
What A Serious Conservative Legal Shop Would Actually Do
If this new firm is more than a press release, it will have to live in unglamorous rooms. Discovery fights. Fee petitions. Insurance coverage letters. State administrative records. The boring work is the work.
- Track serial complainants and recycled affidavits.
- Use fee-shifting statutes wherever they actually fit.
- Challenge jurisdiction when boards wander past their charter.
- Defend the next Eastman before the next Eastman is broke.
- Publish process timelines so the public can see delay as a tactic.
Notice what is missing from that list. There is no call for inventing crimes. There is no need to smear private lives. Counterpressure can stay inside civil and professional remedies. If it cannot, it becomes the thing it claims to oppose.
Why This Matters Beyond One Faction
People who never vote conservative still have a stake in two-sided courts. Environmental plaintiffs need defense lawyers who are not terrified. Criminal defendants need counsel who will anger a popular prosecutor. Campus speakers need someone willing to file the unfashionable brief. A profession that only protects safe clients is a guild, not a bar.
The presidency, election administration, and energy policy all travel through lawyers. If those lawyers can be picked off by coordinated ethics theater, the public does not lose a pundit. It loses a channel of argument. I would rather hear the argument and reject it than watch it become unsayable because the speaker’s license is in a drawer.
Evenhanded court advocacy is not a courtesy. It is how a large country settles fights without breaking the furniture every cycle.
The Temptation To Wait For Better Manners
Some conservatives still hope the temperature drops and everyone returns to law review footnotes. Maybe. I would not bet the next decade on it. Incentives are stubborn. If intimidation works, it gets copied. If it is costly, it gets rarer. That is not cynicism. That is how adults budget.
Reaching across the aisle is a virtue in a legislature that still shares a country. It is a sucker’s reflex when the other side has already defined you as an illegitimate participant in the legal market. You can keep offering coffee. You should also keep your files.
Is there a risk that offense becomes obsession? Yes. Movements get drunk on payback. The guardrail is simple to state and hard to keep. Target process abuse, not identity. Target coordination and bad faith, not every disagreeable brief. Keep the remedy proportional. If you cannot do that, do not start.
A Longer View Of Professional Courage
Every generation of lawyers tells a story about courage. Usually it is a story about someone else’s courage, safely in the past. The live version is less flattering. It involves missed dinners, frozen retainers, and friends who suddenly need to check with communications first.
Country, in the old-fashioned sense, does ask something of people with rare skills. That sentence can sound corny. It can also be accurate. If the best conservative lawyers sit out the ugly files, the ugly files still exist. They are simply argued by whoever is left, or not argued at all.
I do not know whether a single new firm can reprice lawfare. Markets are larger than founders. I do know that leaving the field to one well-funded network was a strategic error. Errors can be corrected. They are rarely corrected by hoping the other side gets bored.
Closing The Loop Without Pretending It Is Simple
So where does that leave a reader who is not a lawyer and never wanted to be? It leaves you with a clearer picture of why some political fights feel endless. They are not only about statutes. They are about who is allowed to stand up and speak the statute into a microphone without losing the right to earn a living.
Lawfare is the strategic use of legal process to intimidate, distract, defame, or exhaust. Over the past decade one side built a machine for that work. The other side mostly wrote op-eds about norms. The new wager is that a purpose-built firm, led by someone who has already been through the blender, can change the math.
Will it? Ask again after the first fee award, the first dismissed complaint that should have been dismissed in month two, and the first elite firm that takes a controversial conservative client without a six-month identity crisis. Until then, the honest posture is watchful, not triumphant.
The courts can remain a meeting ground. They can also become a sorting hat. The difference is not a theory in a journal. The difference is whether enough advocates are still willing to walk in, sit down, and return fire when the paperwork itself has become the weapon.
