I am aware that a vast majority of Americans could no more financially survive a protracted lawsuit than they could physically survive a bomb being dropped on their house in the middle of the night.  There are, however, a growing group of Americans so wealthy that they can successfully fend off any lawsuit or legal action that comes their way, and also initiate an unending legal action against anyone who irritates them.  Franz Kafka would probably say “I warned you all 100 years ago”. All it takes is obscene private wealth, a fragile ego and a legal staff who act like an insect repellent to keep the troubles at a distance.  Finally, what is accelerating this trend for the wealthy is a Supreme Court that looks more and more like baseball’s home base of safety for those practitioners of lawfare.  Every pop fly is a home run.  When the aggressor is connected to the Executive branch of American power, the rulings are called “justice”, and when the defendant or plaintiff has only at hand the common American’s reliance on the vote and a deflated Constitution, the tendency is to call the controversy ‘weaponized”.  To be safe from the law of the land one needs large money and if you have obscene amounts of private wealth you can be above, beyond, below or aside the beleaguered rule-of-law. Lawfare becomes the gate in a gated extra-legal growing community.

A modest proposal for good

A democracy is defined and made possible in large part by the guidelines of existing public law, enforced and operating faithfully out of the context of the Constitution. A democracy also recognizes that law cannot and should not cover every circumstance of human life so the practitioners of law must also rely on the ethics and morality implied by those laws that serve as the system’s stabilizing skeleton. We should have seen this coming when a convicted felon awaiting sentencing became the executive power of the whole fragile system of balances that is dependent on both power and public morality. The law cannot be seen as a shootout, gameshow or even a well written miniseries. The profiles of power in this nation are way too distorted to treat the the justice system as a reality show or entertainment.  This is life, and human life needs to be guided by healthy adults capable of rationale thought, empathy and compassion. Obscene private wealth over time wreaks terminal havoc on the individual charged with living out the three democratic attributes thought, empathy and compassion. Good is removing the financial incentives for the corruption of power and when we decide to do that we might have just made room for this thing called democracy in our system of governance.  That would be good.