Deborah Pearlstein , The New York Times; The Trump Administration Floats a New Way to Humiliate the Legal Profession
"To fill those empty seats, the department has begun an increasingly desperate effort to recruit hires. (“Don’t be scared off by the transcript requirement,” a conservative law school reportedly told its students. “G.P.A. is not a strong factor.”) Even so, it seems too few lawyers are willing to take the chance. So the Trump administration last week offered up a different solution: a proposed rule that aims to shield Department of Justice lawyers from independent ethics investigations.
Such an arrangement would run afoul of a federal law known as the McDade Amendment, which says that government lawyers are subject to the ethics rules of the states in which they practice, “to the same extent and in the same manner” as every other lawyer licensed in the state. The proposed rule would be challenged in court immediately if it ever took effect. It shouldn’t get that far, however. It would do much more than potentially give department lawyers a free pass to lie on the president’s behalf. It would severely limit the courts’ ability to offer any kind of independent check on the executive branch.
Rules requiring lawyers to serve as honest officers of the court have been adopted by every state and the District of Columbia. They serve a host of purposes, starting with the basic right to fairness. These rules are also critical to the independence of the courts, which depend on access to reliable evidence and accurate representations by counsel.
Such rules serve an especially critical function in constitutional democracies, which distinguish themselves from authoritarian regimes in part by insisting that truth and falsehood exist separately from whatever the government may assert...
The move against state bars is of a piece with the administration’s broader strategy against universities, the media and law firms — any set of organizations capable of challenging the president’s power. And few things threaten it more than holding it to the truth."
