MAY 1, 2026 – Long before the Trump Era, I used to muse that “In America one could find the best of life and the worst of life.” This observation was not particularly insightful. After all, we have a population of around 340 million living within 3.8 million square miles spread across 58 degrees of longitude (105, if you take the Aleutian Islands into account) and 25 degrees of latitude (53, including Alaska and Hawaii). Stir such a large pot, and you’ll get dregs right along with “la crême de la crême.”
Government, of course, is no exception, though die-hard anarchists might argue the point, convinced that “good government” or “good governance,” is oxymoronic. Today I was reminded of the Great American Dichotomy when I stumbled across a news story about the DOJ’s recent retributive attack on the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). As the informed reader knows, at the direction of you-know-who, the Department of Justice launched a criminal case against SPLC on the claim that the non-profit organization—advocating for civil rights and the public interest—had defrauded its donors by not disclosing payments to informants of extremist right-wing political groups. The 11-count indictment was loaded up predictably with bank and wire fraud charges relating to the payments.
As originally reported, the indictment struck me as flimsy, at best. Moreover, these days whenever the United States Department of Justice announces an investigation or indictment against anyone in the political sphere, I react with skepticism, especially against the backdrop of (a) Trump’s treatment of the United States Department of Justice as his personal in-house law firm; (b) his litigious history, his failure rate at early stages of litigation (e.g. dismissal of phony-baloney suits filed by him), and his use of litigation as a cudgel, not a force for justice; and (c) inaction by the same DOJ in all matters relating to Jeffrey Epstein. In Trump’s view, litigation has nothing to do with underlying merits—factual or legal. It’s a shotgun, and whether it’s loaded matters not to him. His sole objective is extortion, which, as we’ve seen, can often be achieved without “ammo.”
But today I read an open letter from Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-MD), ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, and Congresswoman Mary Gay Scanlon (D-PA), ranking member of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government. The letter converted my skepticism into outright rejection of the DOJ’s claims against SCPL.
A Phi Beta Kappa magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College and magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, Raskin taught constitutional law for 25 years at American University Washington College of Law before being elected to Congress. He gained prominence as the impeachment manager in Impeachment II (Jan. 6 insurrection). I followed him closely and was impressed by his grasp of law and facts and presentation skills. He struck me as deserving membership in the pantheon of defenders of the Constitution—a group including those who stood up to Joseph McCarthy in the early 50s and those who brought down Richard Nixon a generation later.
Congresswoman Scanlon is no slouch either. A graduate of Colgate University, she obtained her law degree from the University of Pennsylvania and developed a distinguished career practicing public interest law.
Their credentials as serious students of law and genuine advocates for justice and the rule of law are on full display in the six-page letter Raskin and Scanlon co-authored and directed yesterday to Aakash Singh, Associate Deputy Attorney General. In that letter, they excoriated Mr. Singh and the DOJ for acting on behalf of Trump, personally—as opposed to the United States—and for patently political purposes, not in the interest of justice and on the basis of meritorious claims.
The letter reads like a carefully crafted legal brief. Though its necessity ought to disturb anyone concerned about the Trump Administration’s unrelenting abuse of legal process and assault on the rule of law, the letter should also give us confidence that serious adults with impressive constitutional chops do serve in Congress; are awake at the switches of governance; are dedicated to protecting—or at this stage, recovering—our foundational principles, leading with the rule of, not abuse of, law.
The best that the Republicans have mustered in response is to trot out the same tired line: the SPLC is just another bunch of “Marxist, leftist extremists.”[1]
The criticisms leveled by Raskin and Scanlon in their letter to Mr. Singh reminded me of a presentation I heard the other day by Professor Alan Rozenshtein, who teaches constitutional law at the University of Minnesota School of Law. He was a panelist in a University of St. Thomas School of Law symposium on the Constitutional Rights of Lawyers and Law Firms. Professor Rozenshtein is a former DOJ attorney who sounded alarms about the gross deterioration of ethical standards in the DOJ of the current Administration.
In his day at the DOJ (2013 – 2017), every new attorney was instructed at the outset of Day One of the job to sit down and write a letter of resignation. “The purpose,” he said, “was to be prepared: If you were ever given a directive to do something that was illegal, unconstitutional or unethical and you couldn’t convince your superior to rescind the order, you were to pull out your pre-drafted resignation letter, sign it, turn it in and walk out the door. Since the start of Trump’s second administration,” Professor Rozenshtein continued, “lawyers at the DOJ have been handing in their letters of resignation, and it’s become extremely hard to replace them—lawyers are concerned about incurring reputational harm if they join today’s DOJ.”
The story was well taken by everyone attending the symposium. In the face of illegal, unconstitutional and unethical practices by “Trump’s DOJ,” exemplified most recently by the baseless case against the Southern Poverty Law Center, more principled lawyers are pushing back. To them much is owed. A sound legal system centered on justice, integrity and the rule of law is the primary bulwark against rule by the fiat of an authoritarian driven by a need for retribution.
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© 2026 by Eric Nilsson
[1] Republican and DOJ characterization of the SPLC as a “Marxist, leftist, extremist” organization is patently disingenuous, given that the phony charges imply sympathy for (“defrauded”) donors to the outfit, who presumably, embrace the allegedly “Marxist, leftist, extremist” views of SPLC.
