What Makes Law Tenable, If It Can Be Courted with Prejudice

It seems a conversation, or even just an observation, can elicit an emotive reaction strong enough to push me toward pondering, searching, and writing. In speaking with a colleague who shared that his contract was abruptly terminated under the DOGE takeover, it triggered me. So many lives have been imperiled, thrown into disarray at the wanton claim of reform—reform packaged as necessary to quell government overspending, but carried out with a brutality that cuts through livelihoods without care. In their calamity, my own thoughts seek recourse. And so I pen my tensions, my disturbance, my disquiet. You, the reader, are where I air these thoughts.

Confession and Voice

I confess—I am no hero, no anointed spokesperson of politics. With the state of U.S. governance as it is, I should probably do better to pretend I am only a skeptic, tuck my disturbed energy into safer silence, and let rhetoric pass me by. But words press on me. Word-decreed, not degree-decreed—that is my deliberate signature. I ask not with authority but with ache. If liberty and justice are more than ceremonial oaths, then even my shallow voice deserves its day of hearing.

The Narrow Corridor of Justice

So I asked aloud: could a coalition of attorneys, a former President, his Department of Justice chief, and the most studied constitutional minds mount a class action against the government for unconstitutional premise? The research returned a cold answer: not against the President himself, but only against the agencies who carry out his charge. The law, it seems, always points its finger at the machinery, never the hand that turns the key. And that reply reveals something deeper—that justice is often reduced to a corridor so narrow that by the time you walk through, the larger questions have been left at the door.

What I Overlooked

And I admit—there are things I did not pay attention to, things I brushed past or even ignored, like the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025. Little did I understand the ramifications, that these were not random players but architects of a preparation path decades long. All that was required was the arrival of an individual who could embody the uneducated, the gullible, the travesty of personhood, and be maneuvered like a marionette. Someone handed figurehead authority, leaning on a Supreme Court tilted in his favor, parlaying a monopoly of power where family legacies and loyal legions are scripted as the default winners. So where are the intelligentsia to match this deception? Who will carve a parallel path of distinguished intelligence for those of us not invited to the chosen rooms?

What tips an election is one matter. What tips the scales of law for decades is another

When Kamala Harris sat on The View and said the lesson is “bigger than Trump,” she pulled back a curtain many would rather keep drawn. What tips an election is one matter. What tips the scales of law for decades is another. The Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation have long played both the shadow and the spotlight—curating judges, drafting blueprints, shaping the very stage on which our democracy performs. If this has been a plan in the making for generations, then how do we live with the realization that law is not neutral parchment but a sculpted instrument, carved by those with the chisel of power in their hands?

It is terrifying when power is installed to hold citizens like hostages in a cage. When National Guard units are unleashed on cities without due process, when agents—hired en masse, promised bounties—wreak treacherous havoc in courthouses, on elected officials, or even on students in classrooms, what does that say about the purveyors of law?

The Threat Within

And when institutions align to crown what is “lawful,” it becomes more than a legal problem—it becomes a threat to us all. Do those men and women who swear by statutes still serve the public good—or do they now enforce a doctrine that shields power and brutalizes dissent? Do we dare ask, stubbornly and without excuse, what it means when the Constitution is wielded not as a common promise but as a weapon and a shield for the few?

Invitations, Not Answers

These are not tidy answers but invitations. If the law is a cage, perhaps the lesson is to stop mistaking the bars for protection. What does it mean to seek justice when every pathway to contest is narrowed, obscured, or blocked? And if law has turned into its own fortress, then how do we recover the courage to ask—openly, persistently, insistently—whether “lawful” has ever truly meant “just”?

The People’s Exchange

I end by saying this anecdotally: we, the ones less troughed in conspiracy and ambitious engineering, the indigenous, the immigrants, the hard workers, the boots on the ground of all walks of life, the thespians and thinkers who are least empowered to hold constitutional law hostage—we are not powerless. We can still harness the core of human investment and improvement. We can reclaim our duty to movement and enrichment.

By tasking our efforts with solidarity, stewardship, and bravery, we create a powerful exchange—one that rebirths a constitutional framework not captured by private legions or cloistered elites, but carried by the people who must live under it. And perhaps, if there is to be a new dawn, it will rise with the woman who holds the birthright to be empowered, not puppeteered.