Now is our time. All of us democratic Americans. Right now!

A patriotic, Constitution-loving friend directed me to the brief LinkedIn commentary below by Harvard Law School professor Jody Freeman.

Her urgent message is that complacency and silence are not options at this perilous time, because "what's happening to your government is ... fundamental and critical to the foundation of our rule of law system."

Freeman's is a vital charge -- and not a new one:

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good (wo)men to do nothing” is the celebrated caution attributed variously to Edmund Burke (1729-1797) and John Stuart Mill (1806-73).

They knew the world in which we Americans are living today.

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By Jody Freeman

February 1, 2025

Jody Freeman is Archibald Cox Professor of Law, and Director of the Environmental and Energy Law Program, at Harvard Law School. She wrote and posted this essay on LinkedIn.

I'm confronting a lot of people saying "nothing matters" whether in partial jest or with total conviction. With respect and humility, may I urge us not to give in to this impulse.

Last week, the Trump administration made clear how utterly dedicated it is to blowing up professional, non-partisan government, which Congress has quite intentionally designed to have built-in accountability mechanisms and numerous safeguards (like employment protections for dedicated career staff), to work in the public interest. The threatened firings (resign or else!), actual firings (which for senior career officials are patently illegal), reassignments to new posts (jettisoning decades of expertise) and just general denigration going on at DOJ --including at the FBI of course, but also in other divisions that enforce many consumer protection, public health, public safety, workplace protection, civil rights and criminal laws has been stunning and chilling.

We should be alarmed. This is worth caring about.

These sort of moves are the kind you make when you want to use the Justice Department on behalf of your friends and against your enemies without anyone saying stop, or no, or that would be a terrible judgment, or the facts don't support this, or we don't do this and here is why. (It is straight out of the authoritarian playbook, too, because what do you need other than prosecutors and the military, and a few oligarchs, to entrench control... but I shall not go quite that dark yet).

What's happening to your government is not a simple personnel shuffle like we see with any change of administration and it's not some long overdue, mostly well-intended, RIFing to trim out some inefficiency. It's more important than any single policy shift (on taxes or tariffs or environmental protection or crypto regulation). It's fundamental and critical to the foundation of our rule of law system.

If Congress does not act to block some of this then we will need to rely on the courts, and public outrage, which are not unrelated.

So. please dispense with the nihilism. Everything matters, not nothing. Kiss your local federal judge. Or at least give them a hug. Embrace jury service. Because we are going to need the judges and the juries. And make a decision about how and when you are going to express some outrage. Because we are going to need that, and a lot of it, too.

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