As Shakespeare famously wrote in Henry VI Part II: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."

Even for me as a lawyer, it's hard not to sympathize with that sentiment. Lawyers are a drag. But in reflective moments, I'm more partial to Sir Thomas More's line from Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons: "And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's!"

The evenhanded application of the law is a principle that must be defended. Everywhere, balance and perspective are under attack. Whatever the costs of America's process-heavy adversarial contests, that feature of our polity is a key bulwark of liberty. Due process is not something to be trifled with, deconstructed, or thrown away based on the passions of the political moment.

Yet that is happening, right now. The Left has set the lines of battle: Any lawyers who worked for President Trump with verve and ingenuity, along with any lawyers he retained to mount his various 2020 election contests, must be crushed, must have their noses rubbed into the dirt, must if possible lose their jobs and even their right to practice law. It's not right, just as it would not have been right to demonize the lawyers who mounted Al Gore's challenges to the 2000 presidential election in Florida.

On the Left, the constant rallying cry is "Remember January 6!" It's like a woke version of "Remember the Alamo!", designed to divide and conquer instead of unite the nation in the spirit of apple-pie American patriotism. For those who know me, I'm a lot more partial to traditional patriotism than to false and cynical attempts by MSNBC and its ilk to use the aberration of January 6 as some kind of Rosetta Stone to American politics. As James O'Keefe has recently brought to light, even Matthew Rosenberg of the New York Times secretly knows I'm right.