The conservative legal movement keeps racking up wins while the MAGA movement keeps stepping on rakes, according to a new analysis.
Elite right-wing lawyers have recently won U.S. Supreme Court victories invalidating affirmative action and upholding the right of some businesses to discriminate against LGBTQ people, but Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent noticed that MAGA Republicans have been beset by a "a string of disastrous setbacks."
"In a sense, this story is more than half a century old. Going back to the 1950s and ’60s campaign to impeach liberal Chief Justice Earl Warren, the populist right has long relied on haphazard legal bomb-throwing that pleases the masses but steadily fails to yield results," Sargent wrote. "By contrast, other conservative elites adopted a long-game plan of legal institution-building that — unfortunately for liberals — is delivering in a big way."
MAGA lawmakers like Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) are leading the charge to impeach Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, but many high-profile legal conservatives and more moderate GOP lawmakers are speaking out against the move, and leading pro-Trump attorneys Lin Wood, John Eastman and Jeffrey Clark are facing possible legal accountability for their post-election actions.
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"On top of all that, the Supreme Court recently invalidated the theory, pushed by many elite MAGA die-hards, holding that state legislatures have quasi-unlimited powers over how elections are run," Sargent wrote. "All this leaves less room for MAGA-adjacent GOP lawyers to find their own Eastman-like niches in 2024. And even some Republicans admit the indictment of Trump raises serious questions about his misconduct, suggesting that MAGA-approved legal defenses of him will get much harder to sustain."
Trump's most serious GOP rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has seen many of his initiatives tripped up in court, but the inability of the MAGA movement to turn their priorities into law has revealed the limitations of their legal skills.
"Many traditional legal conservatives cheerfully hitched their long-term project to Trump’s presidency, and many of their cherished initiatives — from Bush v. Gore to the swiped Garland seat to the Supreme Court’s gutting of voting rights — are hardly more unsullied than anything the MAGA project might dream up," Sargent wrote. "But still, there does seem to be a real schism between the successes elite conservatism is enjoying and the fiascoes that MAGA elites are facing. It may seem to liberals like a negligible consolation prize, but these setbacks are a big story — and a relatively positive one."
