What is it like to be a fascist?

Hey look everybody, it’s Ted Cruz identifying the Enemies of the People on national TV:

“She came out of law school, and she clerked for Justice Breyer on the Supreme Court. And she became a federal public defender,” Cruz said. “And you and I have both known public defenders. People go and do that because their heart is with criminal defendants. Their heart is with the murderers, the criminals, and that that’s who they’re rooting for. A lot of the same reasons people go and become prosecutors—because they want to lock up bad guys—public defenders often have a natural inclination in the direction of the criminal. And I gotta say that inclination was not just while she was a public defender, but she carried it onto the bench.”

Those of you not trying to figure out what the tainted blood is doing to the soil already know there are all sorts of extremely honorable reasons to be a public defender, including but not limited to:

(1) Representing the non-trivial percentage of defendants who are factually innocent.

(2) Representing the much larger percentage of defendants who are guilty of something, but who have been grossly overcharged by prosecutors trying to avoid a trial.

(3) Representing people who are guilty as charged, but who still shouldn’t be run over by the awesome machinery of the state without someone forcing the state to adhere to the required “technicalities” before doing so, aka the law.

BTW people who take on this job also enjoy the benefits of getting paid $50,000 per year and sometimes less to handle caseloads that would crush anyone who wasn’t inured to the reality that caseloads that make adequately representing all your clients completely impossible are just part of the job.

Also too, I notice that various good Germans at National Review etc. are tut-tutting this as going a bit too far. You still think you can control them?