It was so embarrassing that almost all of our alleged news organizations don’t want to publicize the debacle, though EA reader and occasional commenter James Flood, a lawyer who does have integrity, flagged the exchange in his comment to this post. Over at Memeorandum, which I officially regret ever endorsing on EA and hereby retract said endorsement, there is no mention of the ABA’s public disgrace as I type this at 10:08 EST. The New York Times, of “All the News That’s Fit to Print” fame, has no mention of it in today’s paper or on its website. Neither does the Washington Post, in the city with more lawyers per square foot than anywhere else in America , and that proclaims “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

NPR? Nope. CNN? Nah. MSNBC? You have to be joking….

As you can see from the above clips (the rest of her disgraceful testimony can be tracked down I’m sure, but those examples are sufficient) Behnke gives Congress the equivalent of a Fifth Amendment plea. (It is evidence of unethical conduct for a lawyer to plead the Fifth Amendment.) Lawyers were partly responsible for the horrible performance of Claudine Gay, briefly Harvard’s DEI president and her counterparts at MIT and the University of Pennsylvania in 2024, when they repeated a non-responsive mantra drafted by a single law firm when questioned regarding anti-Semitism on their campuses. Yet even though that offensive lack of candor and transparency led to two of the three being forced out of their positions, the ABA opted for the exact same strategy when it knew its leader was going to face a tough examination on the topic of DEI in law schools and elsewhere.

Behnke’s refusal to be direct, open and honest wasn’t just embarrassing, and it wasn’t just damning. It was also so, so stupid. Either Behnke allowed herself to become a walking, talking example of what results from DEI policies (she is, as you can see, a black woman), or she chose to demonstrate, in Congress, under oath, in a camera’s focus, exactly those traits antithetical to trust. She looked Rep. Gill right in the eyes and pretended that she was answering his questions when she was not. She was avoiding answering his questions; a child could see it. She refused to answer his questions. The reason was that honest answers would have made her organization look terrible, and made the conclusion that DEI policies are hypocritical, illogical, unethical and illegal unavoidable.

Guess what other organization has chosen to ignore yesterday’s “the emperor has no clothes” moment. The Association for Professional Responsibility Lawyers, an organization I pay dues to and that supposedly is dedicated to a mission that includes encouraging “the study, development, and implementation of sound ethical standards within the legal profession.” The membership is currently using its listserv to debate whether it is ethical to defend a corrupt prosecutor who is facing sanctions. A prominent representative of their profession just displayed the worst of the traits the public associates with lawyers and at the root of growing public distrust of a crucial public service that cannot function without public trust, and their level of concern?

I have taken too long to draft this post because I am nearly paralyzed with fury. I hesitate to raise this issue with the APRL membership because, as I have documented here several times, they are overwhelmingly left-biased, almost all ABA members, and so frequently have proven immune to challenges to their hide-bound biases that I have no hope of a reaction that will accomplish anything but making me more discouraged than I already am.

For later exposition: I am working with a group to establish a new organization called “The Ethical Lawyer’s Network.”

I just hope I’m not too late.