The antidote to lawlessness is the law
Anti-legalism, Charlotte, and why the Constitution is winning
We are in the middle of one of the brightest stretches in months. In fact, I feel more optimistic about the future of our constitutional democracy than I have any time since November 5, 2024.
To explain why, we have to go a little dark. But I promise, we’ll get back to the light.
This past week, Border Patrol’s raiders moved on to Charlotte, North Carolina. “Operation Charlotte’s Web”1 was swift and disruptive. 200 agents deployed to, in the words of its leader, Greg Bovino, “hit Charlotte like a storm.”
City officials were surprised, and local law enforcement were given no details. Federal agents broke windows, arrested U.S. citizens, and even stormed one of the city’s oldest country clubs. Even the state’s Republican senator, Thom Tillis, was in the dark — leading him to push back and call for oversight.
Predictably, churches sat half-empty. Businesses, especially Latino-owned ones, closed in the chaos. Over 30,000 students — one in five schoolchildren in Charlotte — stayed home from school, many presumably out of fear of being profiled.
Next came a smaller deployment in Raleigh. Apparently New Orleans is next. (You’ll notice none of these cities are anywhere near a border.)
This roving chaos strategy is not so much “law enforcement” as, in the president’s words, a “war from within.”
The scenes in Charlotte were also the latest iteration of the administration’s extreme disdain for the concepts of predictability, law, and rules. This pattern — what we might call “anti-legalism” — is so extensive, so extreme, that one could even argue it’s the governing ethos of this White House.
The American people are not, however, powerless to stop a lawless government. Anti-legalism can be overcome not by responding in-kind, but instead with redoubled commitment to the rule of law and the Constitution. This is already happening. We saw it in Charlotte this week just like we saw it in Chicago before.
The administration’s anti-legalism is purposeful
Anti-legalism is one of those trends that once you see, you can’t unsee it.
It’s a pattern that ties together almost all the Trump administration’s disparate actions — from the destruction of the East Wing and the apparent graft and bribery scandals, to the spending abuses and censorship campaigns, to the attempts to politicize previously apolitical institutions, like the Department of Justice and the military.
It’s not just that Trump and his administration routinely break the law. It’s that they seem to delight in doing so. That they are openly contemptuous of any suggestion of limits, guardrails, or rules. And when challenged on the law — by courts, by Congress, by civil servants, by national security leaders — they lash out with undisguised fury.
This week, a set of veterans and former national security professionals in Congress released a video aimed at military and intelligence officers with a simple message reaffirming their oaths to the Constitution.
“You must refuse illegal orders.”
Before you read on, watch the video. Genuinely: That’s essentially all they say.
This argument is not legally controversial. Military law is clear: Our soldiers have the right, and in some cases the duty, to disobey illegal orders. If the commander in chief tomorrow were to order the Pentagon to bomb American cities, our military would be legally obligated to refuse — under penalty of court martial.
This commitment to law is a fundamental principle of our armed forces.
And yet what was the president’s response? He implied those members of Congress should be executed (and re-posted a call for them to be hanged).
It’s a particularly gruesome illustration of the logic here. Anti-legalism seeks to destroy the rule of law so that the only thing that matters is the will of the leader.
Disobedience — even when demanded by the law and Constitution — becomes tantamount to treason.
Immigration chaos is where anti-legalism becomes real
There’s a reason why scenes like those in Charlotte are — so far — the most visceral expression of anti-legalism. When it comes to human impacts on real people, nowhere are the consequences of upending the rules greater than in the realm of immigration.
As Ansley Skipper writes in The Bulwark this week, the earthquake-like shift of immigration policy in the second Trump term isn’t so much from lax to strict enforcement — it’s from rules-based enforcement to reprisals against rule-following. We’ve gone from a system that encourages orderly conduct to one that often seems to expressly punish people for following the law.
Read her piece: Arrested for following the rules.
For decades, most Americans—Republicans and Democrats alike—professed to support an immigration system that encouraged and rewarded people who followed the rules. There’s a basic instinct toward fairness that underlies this policy preference. Get in line, do things the right way, wait your turn, and you’ll get ahead. The message our system sent to immigrants was that it was safer, easier, and quicker to follow the legal process than circumvent it. There was an incentive to follow the law.
Now the reverse is true. Whether this is a conscious strategy on the part of the Trump administration or not, the signal is being sent that following the law will put you in harm’s way.
Immigration attorneys are increasingly warning their clients that they could be arrested at routine meetings with immigration authorities. The people being targeted are complying with the law and pursuing immigration benefits consistent with the established process.
Should anti-legalism continue to spread, it’s not just immigrants who will find the principles of law turned upside down like this. What happens to the individual soldiers if Trump starts issuing illegal orders? What about business leaders who refuse to pay bribes? Scientists who promote facts, not politics? Journalists who tell the truth not propaganda?
What about ordinary citizens who simply want to vote their conscience or speak their minds, regardless of what the president tells them to do?
Sooner or later, all of us might come to face a situation where following the rules could put us in danger.
With our help, the Constitution can overcome anti-legalism
All of that is their strategy. So what is ours?
The good news is, it’s extraordinarily simple. In fact, it’s two words:
The Constitution.
To be clear: I do not mean that “the law will save us” or “the lawyers will fix this” or even that “legalism” — which I’d define as excessive attachment to law for its own sake — is good or healthy.
I simply mean that, to beat an ideology that opposes constitutional government, we must run towards those principles that it rejects. Instead of waiting idly for the courts or Congress or the law to somehow stop anti-legalism in its tracks, we must all take up the rights, freedoms, and principles enshrined in the Constitution — and use them to protect and strengthen the rule of law.
We know this can work. Because it happened in both Chicago and Charlotte.
When Greg Bovino and his forces of lawlessness descended on their cities, Chicagoans and Charlotteans very much would have made the country’s Founders proud. They responded constitutionally.
Not with acquiescence, but with righteousness.
Not with violence, but with peaceful protest.
Not with self-censorship, but with journalism.
Not with silence, but with free expression.
Not with lawlessness. With commitment to the law.
Our lawsuit on behalf of protestors, clergy, and journalists in Chicago was just one part of a massive and ongoing civic and constitutional upswell in cities across the country. Lawsuits like these are merely the legal component of an ongoing, organic mobilization against lawlessness emanating from the federal government.
So far, all of this constitutional mobilization, together, is working.
The litigation is ongoing — the district court issued an opinion yesterday documenting the many lies told by DHS officials in furtherance of the administration’s campaign to terrorize Chicago neighborhoods. As the judge concluded, “[T]he Court finds Defendants’ evidence simply not credible.” Her order is currently on appeal.
But Bovino and his raiders are no longer in Chicago. One way or another, Chicagoans have already won a significant victory for the rule of law.
Read this piece by Garrett Graff: Trump, Border Patrol retreat in failure from Chicago.
Bovino’s Border Patrol raiders have one playbook — terror — and it’s less effective each time they deploy it. So far, it’s aging in nuclear half-lives. The shock value is wearing off and, in fact, the targeted communities are fighting back faster and with a more tried-and-true playbook: Organize quickly, step up and document the abuses, protest loudly, and fight in the courtrooms. There’s now an established (and tested) legal playbook to go after CBP’s worst tactics; community members are finding that fighting back against the Border Patrol works, and it’s emboldening even more community members to take stands, even at risk of personal harm. Chicago’s legal strategy built on lessons learned (and even the same witnesses) from Los Angeles and other cities have faced Bovino before — and now their lessons can be applied in Chicago.
Again, none of this is to downplay the legit terror that the masked, military-style Border Patrol raids have inflicted on these communities. “Kids were tear gassed on their way to celebrate Halloween in their local school parking lot,” Judge Sara Ellis said in Chicago. “These kids, you can imagine, their sense of safety was shattered ... and it’s gonna take a long time for that to come back, if ever.” We can’t forget, downplay, or minimize any of that. Going forward, we must do everything we can to hold Bovino and other DHS leaders legally and criminally accountable for their actions and betrayal of the nation’s trust. But we also can’t afford to make these efforts seem unstoppable or ten-feet-tall. Chicago resisted with everything they could, and it worked.
As of yesterday, they reportedly left Charlotte, too. Anti-legalism is a losing strategy in this country.
The Constitution is winning.
Your moment of collective courage:
Read this delightful profile from Mother Jones: Meet the veteran who chases ICE on a scooter.
Recently, Clifford “Buzz” Grambo decided to upgrade his electric scooter. The old one he had purchased online reached only 16 mph and wasn’t cutting it anymore. He needed to go faster to keep up with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement cars he chases around Baltimore. So Grambo bought a Segway Max G3, which features a 2,000-watt motor and can get up to 28 mph.
“The first time I caught up to them, I could tell that they already knew who I was,” he told me when we first spoke on the phone in late October. “They had seen me before, so they thought they were just going to speed away. I was like, ‘Ha ha, bitches, I got a new scooter!’”
What else we’re tracking:
A not-disimilar case for optimism from Jonathan V. Last: “I come to you at the turning of the tide.”
The perils of politicizing the U.S. Military: six senior national security leaders warn of the significant risks that politicizing the military poses to our national security. The paper highlights several concerning trends — domestic deployments, removals of senior military leaders and legal advisers, and the politicized use of military symbols — and offers recommendations for preserving an apolitical military.
A judge ordered the end of the administration’s deployment of National Guard to Washington, D.C., but stayed the order pending appeal.
The president denigrated Jamal Khashoggi, the murdered Washington Post journalist, in front of the man who according to U.S. intelligence ordered him dismembered with a bone saw.
UCLA law professor Rick Hasen has a helpful explainer on why civil society will be needed to protect the 2026 elections.
Don’t look now, but the authoritarian coalition may be fracturing. Two good pieces worth reading today. The Atlantic: The GOP is realizing that Trump won’t be around forever. The New York Times: Congressional Republicans begin to look beyond Trump.
Highly recommend Law Dork’s Chris Geidner on why E.B. White would have found this name choice so deeply offensive: Gregory Bovino is exactly who E.B. White — author of ‘Charlotte’s Web’ — warned us about. (Then, as a palette cleanser, read this, also by White.)
The line "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" is from Shakespeare's play Henry VI, Part 2, and is often misunderstood. In the play, it is spoken by a rebel leader who wants to create anarchy, implying that lawyers are obstacles to chaos because they uphold the law and social order. The quote is now seen as an acknowledgment of the crucial role lawyers play in maintaining the rule of law and protecting individual rights from tyranny.
"We are in the middle of one of the brightest stretches in months. In fact, I feel more optimistic about the future of our constitutional democracy than I have any time since November 5, 2024."
That's been my sense of things in recent weeks. Let's hope it can be sustained.