Dear John,
As we enter the last month of this difficult year, each day brings a now familiar feeling of heartbreak and hope. The heartbreak is for the families torn apart by masked law enforcement agents too ashamed to show their faces as they violently grab parents away from their small children. It is also for the wanton dismantling of government structures that once delivered critical services.
And we feel heartbreak as an authoritarian leader silences the richest and most powerful law firms and corporations in the country – a silence effectively enabling the explicit corruption of governmental power and the systematic assault on the rule of law.
The hope comes in the form of all of you – the thousands of supporters and volunteers and others across the country who care deeply about the threats to our justice system and the dismantling of policies that have long stood to protect public health, the environment, and the most vulnerable among us.
Hope drives LDAD’s work and the heartbreak drives our pace. We provide these newsletters as an opportunity to share with you examples of the work we do every day in our mutual goals of protecting democracy and the rule of law.
Our amicus work continues. We recently filed an amicus brief in the case of Trump v. Slaughter, urging the U.S. Supreme Court not to treat all multimember independent regulatory commissions created by Congress as executive agencies wholly controlled by the President. As LDAD’s brief argues, two centuries of American history support the position that Congress and the Founders regularly created multimember commissions with features designed to provide some independence from political influence.
LDAD is deeply grateful to the brief’s two principal authors, Georgetown Law Professor Victoria Nourse, a leading scholar on the topic of Congress, the separation of powers, and statutory interpretation, and Georgetown Law Professor and LDAD board member Mitt Regan.
LDAD’s Executive Director recently had the opportunity to conduct a "Chair Chat" interview with UCLA Law Professor Scott Cummings, the author of the critically important law review article, The Autocratic Legal Playbook. Professor Cummings powerfully explains how lawyers – traditionally viewed as defenders of democracy – can also be the architects of its decline through the brutally efficient use of a playbook that describes how lawyers can be used to dismantle democratic guardrails. The Chair Chat was conducted for the American Bar Association’s Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice, in celebration of the Section’s 60th anniversary.
LDAD is grateful to Legal AF’s dynamic Melba Pearson for her recent interview of our Executive Director to discuss LDAD’s work over the past months and our plans for the future.
Today is Giving Tuesday, an opportunity for an early start on your year-end giving. LDAD is fully reliant on your generosity, and we hope that you will include us in your Giving Tuesday donations.
Thank you,
Lawyers Defending American Democracy
