The DNC uses “lawfare” as its most fundamental strategic tool.  Lawfare is the manipulation of the Judiciary, or the courts, in ways that abuse and distort their normal use and purpose, in order to disadvantage an opposing party; to quietly undermine open legislation or the Constitution (for example, concerning the Electoral College); to actually do away with laws that protect civic integrity like voting; or to enact administrative or executive rules that advance any political objective.  The recent lawsuit brought by the DNC and the Harris-Walz campaign against the Georgia election commission concerning vote certification is an example.  The DNC doesn’t want any voters, or their votes, challenged by any rules.

How is the DNC able to carry out systematic lawfare?  Because the DNC is effectively a large law firm.

It is not really designed for politics as we assume in a classical sense, involving an open, public activity.  It does not function as a political organization, but rather, it operates as its own perpetual private government, whether it holds office or not because government and law have become interchangeable.  The DNC’s methods are not open and “inclusive,” but are instead closed and restricted.  More than just lobbying, it operates by mimicking or mirroring an irregular intelligence organization by disrupting normal institutional purposes and functions and replacing them with its own backdoor influence or control.

But where does this kind of behavior come from?

It all starts in our university law schools, where law is taught as an enforceable tool used against other groups or interests.  It doesn’t just use existing rules, or only legally challenge them, but finds exceptions, or “workarounds,” that break the law, but in a presumed “legal” way.  Getting judges to change voting rules by asserting an “emergency” pandemic is an example.

Our law schools are the training ground and operations centers for this irregular legal culture and indoctrination.  Indeed, as activist Ralph Nader put it, we should have a school of the law and a school of the unlawful.  Nader states that in law schools, “the curriculum is built around corporate law, and corporate power, and corporate perpetration, and corporate defense.”  Perhaps.  But what Nader overlooks is that political parties, and our universities, are at heart corporations themselves, and are specially designed to function as privately owned companies without any shareholders except limited private and other corporate donors.

Often lawfare is postured to law students as merely legal strategy, but down in the basement of our law schools, the “academic boiler room” is staffed by thousands of law professors across the country, who are nearly united psychologically and philosophically by a single theory of law that consists of seeing our legal system as a device that can be deployed as an active assault in the name of “justice,” or can be formed, and reformed, into any number of objectives that can be carried out as an actual “legal” operation.  Law is almost a paramilitary exercise in their view. 

How can this be?  Because the progressive left sees itself as a cause with a mission to reform society, by advancing rules, defining and restricting resources, allocating rights and freedoms, and otherwise acting as the unified mechanism of progressive social engineering carried out by the state.

Most of all, it must be remembered that the reason “lawfare” even exists, and why it is inculcated in our law schools, is that law is, first and foremost, a function of the state.  Law emanates from governments, from state institutions, from state employees, and is therefore of government culture.

This makes the law school fundamentally a government school.  More than that, it saturates the law in the assumptions, expectations, ambitions, and conceits of a single state authority.

Lawfare is, in reality, a replacement of markets and competition.  Lawfare seeks to bypass markets — meaning coalitions of voluntary associations — and enforce top-down direction.  The Harris party’s recent declaration of wage-price controls (an idea going back to LBJ’s administration) is a manifestation of this ideology, and it is the ideology of government with one purpose: choose all primary social objectives, make all rules, and enforce them. 

It is the ultimate merger of law and economics.

Matthew G. Andersson is a former CEO and has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time Magazine, the Guardian, the National Academy of Sciences, and the 2001 Pulitzer Prize report by the Chicago Tribune.  He received the Silver Anvil Award from the Public Relations Society of America and has testified before the U.S. Senate.  He is a graduate of the University of Chicago, and the University of Texas at Austin, where he worked with economist and White House national security adviser W.W. Rostow at the LBJ School of Public Affairs.  He is the author of the upcoming book, Legally Blind, concerning law and policy.

Image via Picryl.