Which side are you on?
By 
Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern try to draw a line through the right wing of the legal profession, with corrupt movement lawyers on one side, and John Roberts and Bill Barr et. al. on the other:
The singular role of lawyers in this particular indictment should not go unremarked on. All six (apparently unindicted) co-conspirators who are unnamed in the document appear to be attorneys. Several have been subject to state investigations or disciplinary actions for misconduct and misrepresentations around the 2020 election. And some of the most damning lines in the indictment come from other attorneys in Trump’s orbit who steadfastly stood up for the rule of law in the midst of the conspiracy, up to and including the Jan. 6 insurrection. One of the most chilling details of the indictment is an allegation that top Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark would have deployed the military to quell protests against Trump’s coup. After White House deputy counsel Patrick Philbin told Clark, “There is no option in which you do not leave the White House on Jan. 20,” Clark allegedly responded: “Well … that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act”—a law that would let Trump activate the armed forces against American citizens to achieve his seizure of power. . .
Earlier this year, professors Robert Tsai and Mary Ziegler posited a difference between regular conservative judges (think Chief Justice John Roberts) and “movement judges” (think District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk). A movement judge will ruthlessly pursue ideological and partisan goals at the expense of reason and restraint. That disparity maps perfectly onto the differential that emerges in the lawyers who surrounded Trump in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 insurrection. Many of the lawyers who are not implicated in the indictment—including those in Trump’s own White House and Justice Department—are dyed-in-the-wool conservatives who believe wholeheartedly in the movement’s goals and objectives, yet balked at the proposition of a straight-up coup.
I think this distinction is fundamentally mistaken. The corruption of the Republican party’s legal vanguard isn’t a matter of personal corruption at all. The personally corrupt lawyer, who knowingly violates the law to enrich himself, for example, is always going to be a problem, just as the personally corrupt cop or politician will always be a problem in any system of justice.
The problem with the American right wing is far deeper, since the problem is ideological corruption. In America in 2023, the Republican party is fully dedicated to replacing liberal democracy with authoritarian ethno-nationalism. Donald Trump’s control of the party is both a cause and a symptom of that ideological disease. John Roberts and Bill Barr are just as dedicated to that goal as John Eastman and Jeffrey Clark, because to be a Republican in America in 2023 means being functionally dedicated to that goal, just as being a communist in the USSR in 1935 meant being functionally dedicated to a communist dictatorship. The only difference between the former and the latter lawyers are the purely pragmatic judgments they make about what it’s possible to get away with in the American legal system, given its current contours.
I mean the idea that a revanchist Catholic like Barr has any real allegiance to liberal democratic values is just absurd. Barr doesn’t like Trump because he thinks Trump is too stupid and lazy and personally corrupt to be successfully leading the reactionary revolution Barr has dedicated his life to pursuing. That’s all.
John Roberts knows he needs to get five votes in any case of significance, and behaves accordingly. He’s also all in on advancing reactionary authoritarian ethno-nationalism, because in America right now you’re either opposing the Republican party project or you’re supporting it. There’s no neutral “rule of law” middle ground on this question, which is really the only question.
Mistaking the pragmatic judgments of people like Barr and Roberts for some actual commitment to liberal democracy is a big mistake.