“I see something in you I’ve never seen before and I don’t like it. As a matter of fact, I hate it…Contempt for the law, that’s what you’ve got — it’s a disease, a spreading disease -… You think the law is something that you can get over or get under or get around or just plain flaunt. You start with that and you wind up in the…Well, look at us! The law is the law, whether it’s good or bad. If it’s bad the thing to do is to change it, not just to bust it wide open! You start with one law, then pretty soon it’s all laws, pretty soon it’s everything.”
—Adam Bonner, assistant district attorney, played by Spencer Tracy in the great Hepburn-Tracy comedy “Adams Rib” (1949). The lines were written by the movie’s screenwriting team, Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon
I was re-watching the film this week because I needed a laugh, not because I expected to be yanked kicking and screaming into the into 2026 Anti-I.C.E. madness. But Tracy’s impassioned speech shocked me out of my amusement: When did that rational, pure American, self-evident and irrefutable statement about the society’s crucial fealty to the Rule of Law become controversial?
“Adam’s Rib” has a silly premise: two married lawyers, he a prosecutor, she a defense lawyer, face off in a high profile case where the defendant is none-too-bright wife (played by Judy Holliday) who shot and wounded her cheating husband after she catches him in an embrace with his mistress. The ADA’s proto-feminist wife, played by Katherine Hepburn, mounts a jury nullification defense (that makes no sense but this is a comedy after all), arguing that adultery is accepted by society when a man does it, but is regarded as shameful when indulged in by a woman. Tracy’s prosecution is beyond incompetent and the case puts a strain on his marriage, as he deeply resents his wife’s approach to the law, seeking not to prove her client’s innocence but instead to claim that the defendant had a right to shoot either her cheating husband or his paramour.
As few legal ethics notes are prudent here. Under the mandatory ethics rules that arrived in the Sixties, spouses were prohibited from representing opposing parties, and so were siblings as well as parents and offspring. Jury nullification is forbidden as an argument now: it will lead to a mistrial and lawyer discipline everywhere but New Hampshire. Tracy allows the husband and the mistress to testify without even minimal preparation, resulting in their appearing to the jury as astoundingly unsympathetic. The judge in the case is also incompetent, allowing Hepburn to call various accomplished women to the stand to “prove” the irrelevant point that women are equal to men, as if that were an issue in the case. The issue, and the only issue, was whether the wife shot her husband intentionally. She got a gun, followed him, drew the pistol when she entered the hotel room where he was fooling around with his girl freind, shot several times, and hit him. Her only conceivable defense would have been not guilty by reason of temporary insanity, but Hepburn didn’t plead that.
Never mind the movie, though. It’s the quote I am interested in, because the quote was and is spot-on, as valid today as it was in 1949. Yet, somehow, we have a President who is being vilified for enforcing a necessary law, and an entire political party justifying its existence with the argument that a law not only shouldn’t be enforced, but that it is cruel and undemocratic to enforce it.
There is nothing funny about that. Preposterous, crazy, nonsensical, batty, absurd and stupid, but not funny.
Ethics Alarms 
Imagine the public outcry, street protests, blocking of highways, burning of business neighborhoods and sound stages, etc, if some Hollywood movie’s screenwriting team would have written that exact same quote for a movie being produced in the last year?
I’m going to take a wild guess that Hollywood’s movie screenwriting teams in 1949 were probably about as left leaning as they are today, but the ideological views they chose to project to the silver screen are vastly different than they are in the 21st century.
If fealty to the law mattered, we would still be British subjects. Law only has power and legitimacy via the consent of the governed. If law becomes repugnant, that consent is revoked.
Wow. So, you’re calling for armed rebellion, secession from the Union and formation of a separate nation. Good to know.
Not on point, but I.C.E protestors interrupted a church service in Minnesota to humiliate the pastor/preacher (who I am given to understand is the local I.C.E. director. Here is a report from ABC:
https://abc3340.com/news/nation-world/anti-ice-protesters-storm-church-in-minnesota-during-service-minneapolis-doj-pam-bondi-harmeet-dhillon
Don Lemon, washed up, unemployed, and irrelevant former CNN opinion giver, decided he should confront the pastor during and after the protest/takeover. What a prick. I thought churches were supposed to be sanctuaries, free from politics and disruption.
jvb
These leftists are the arbiters of truth and goodness. They have replaced organized religion with progressivism. Churches are tools of oppression. One of the first things communists do is destroy the churches and eliminate the clergy.
As I read through this introduction, I thought it would be a perfect introduction to all of the allegations that Trump is violating or making law with refutations showing how the accusations actually were examples of TDS. Alas, I should have known better than to expect that.
It appears that a solid majority of Americans oppose ICE efforts to remove those in the country illegally. That’s irrelevant to the enforcement of law, but, that enforcement pill could be swallowed more easily if ICE was not so ham-handed. It does appear to be the case, though, that those who readily and strongly proclaim they are opposed to illegal immigration actually oppose all immigration except for those from select, elite populations.
Correct.
“As I read through this introduction, I thought it would be a perfect introduction to all of the allegations that Trump is violating or making law with refutations showing how the accusations actually were examples of TDS.”
Examples, please. Mine: The TDS’s are arguing that removing Maduro was “illegal,” and it absolutely is not. Give an example where the President has broken a law without a good faith argument that that his actions were legal. I’m asking for an equivilent to the pro-illegal immigration argument, which is “Yes, we know its illegal, but it shouldn’t be, so there!”
“all immigration except for those from select, elite populations.”
Unless this is a coded “everyone who disagrees with me is racist” then you’re describing what every modern country in the world expects of its immigrants. You have to have a job or skills that make you worthy to enter pretty much every first world country in the world.
And this: The “ham-handed” approach is unavoidable when the government let millions of unvetted illegals in ASSUMING that kicking them out would by necessity be so ugly and politically dangerous that no one would dare try it. I wrote about that recently—that’s the ratchet principle Democrats and progressives rely on. It’s the same argument they made against Elon’s cost cutting. With over 20 million illegals, the only way to seriously put a dent in it IS by being ham-handed.
I keep wanting to try my hand at a defense of illegal immigration, if only for the exercise of trying to steel-man the case as best I can conceive. I want to make an argument about the universal destination of goods (not to deny private property, but utilizing the fact that the world was meant for everyone’s use, not just a privileged few). I want to argue that sometimes civil defiance is required to provide the impetus to change bad laws. But every time I start to craft this appeal, I run into the issue from the quote above.
The law exists to provide a structure that we can all flourish within. It provides the rules that, whether we like them or not, inform us about what we can do and what we can’t do, how to arbitrate between disputes, how to petition redress, and so on. Once we know what the law is, and have the confidence that it is enforced, and fairly enforced, then we can go about our business without worry that this action will unexpectedly land us in trouble, or that this person will take advantage of me because the law applies to me but not to him.
We’ve all seen the Crazy Laws books that detail old laws that are still on the books but are no longer enforced. It should be a tragedy that legislative bodies have not made a greater cause for cleaning up the books. I think there’s a thought rampant in our society that if we just stop enforcing certain laws, they then go away, and this is not just in regards to immigration laws. But it certainly seems that is the primary effort we’re seeing in protest against ICE. Get the federal government to back down on enforcing the immigration laws, and maybe then those laws can be declared dead and unenforceable.
The inconsistent enforcement of law, though, is perhaps the most insidious. That breaks down trust, because certain groups targeted for enforcement will resent those that skate free. We’re seeing that with all the howls about political prosecution. Regardless of the justifications on one side or the other, the perception that the law is unequally enforced drives an overall lack of trust in the law, which then breaks down our expectations of how we can run our lives. That erodes social cohesion, as we’re seeing today. If the law no longer protects me, but is a weapon to use against me, then I have no stake in keeping the laws, and I have a very strong reason to seek to remove myself from that system in favor of a system that will protect me.
We have this.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/anti-ice-mob-storms-minnesota-church-over-pastors-alleged-ties-immigration-enforcement