Bought, believed, or both?

One of my favorite topics here, the public’s (and news media’s) misunderstanding of legal ethics and the function of lawyers, recently broke into the news with a crash as progressives saw Barack Obama’s constitutional law professor at Harvard and liberal icon Lawrence Tribe go before Congress and testified against the President’s climate change initiative, the Clean Power Plan, saying that it was the equivalent of “burning the Constitution.” This has been called every name in the book by progressives, from betrayal to greed to dishonesty.

“Laurence Tribe must not have been sworn in over a Bible today before testifying before Congress, because if he had been, that Bible would have burst into flames after his phony testimony about EPA’s legal authority to set standards for unlimited carbon pollution from power plants,” said David DiMartino, adviser to the Climate Action Campaign.“But I guess we shouldn’t be surprised— a wad of coal industry money burning a hole in your pocket can make you do strange things,” he added.

Indeed, Tribe was hired to represent its interests by Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private-sector coal company, and is the company’s counsel in a lawsuit that seeks to invalidate the EPA plan. That is what lawyers do, and what they exist to do: represent citizens and companies as they seek to avail themselves of their guaranteed right to use the law to protect their interests. Continue reading →