The general consensus is that the House Managers did a very effective job of arguing their position on Day 1 of Impeachment 2, where the Senate unsurprisingly voted that it was constitutional to proceed with the impeachment trial. The only surprise was that there was one more Republican vote to proceed than anticipated.
Similarly, the general consensus is that Trump’z last minute replacement defense team, consisting of Bruce Castor and David Schoen were awful, the former rambling and pointless, the latter angry and flagrant. There was nothing new said, provided Castor’s “admission” that Trump lost the election despite Trump pretending otherwise. This wasn’t exactly an epiphany to anyone but Trump, who reportedly was not pleased with his representation.
As is the wont of political comedians, this gave rise to a joke by Jon Stewart.
And is the wont of public defenders, this gave rise to a shitstorm of outrage, reflected in the replies to Stewart and a flurry of quote twits. For the past few years, following the years of public defenders admitting that they were so grossly understaffed and underfunded that they could not provide effective assistance of counsel, and were in fact failing miserably to fulfill their duty under Gideon to defend the indigent, there has been a concerted push to reinvent public defenders as not just the purest of defense but the most skilled, most dedicated, best of breed.
And then came Stewart, bringing up the old trope of public pretenders. Are they even lawyers?
Like most pyramidal organizations, most public defenders are new lawyers, the least experienced in the courthouse. Some will go on to become great lawyers. Some will not. The issue isn’t whether they work hard, which has nothing to do with competence, and for the most part, few of them know how hard anyone else works since they lack any experience doing anything else, so their claims of effort, if not effectiveness, don’t amount to much.
But there are great lawyers who are public defenders. And, as with any group of lawyers, there are shitty lawyers as well. Some will get better. Some will go on to do door law. Some will become judges. Some will become baristas.
The gravamen of this outrage is that public defenders have long been fighting for respect, and with one off-the-cuff quip, no less an icon of wokiosity than Jon Stewart has undermined the aggregation of fierce warriors for the downtrodden fighting for hegemony.
It’s completely understandable why the PDs, and their friends, went ballistic. They believe their story, and they believe that anyone who isn’t evil must back their story up. Any word to the contrary is an attack on public defenders, and no attack on public defenders can be allowed to stand.
But it was a joke. Granted, not a good joke, and (here’s the part where you might be surprised but you shouldn’t be) a joke that came needlessly at the expense of public defenders. You see, they deserve respect for being lawyers, for doing the dirty work of defending the indigent, for working on disgraceful conditions of outrageously high caseloads and receiving inadequate pay. They deserve respect for doing a job that is critical to the functioning of the legal system under conditions no one should have to endure.
And many are excellent lawyers. I know public defenders who are great lawyers. I know great lawyers who were public defenders. I know public defenders who will, with some experience, become great lawyers. Some are not and never will be. Like all lawyers.
Had I been sitting across the desk from Jon Stewart on a cable TV comedy news show and he made that joke to me, I might have responded, “Are you kidding? Even the shittiest PD would have done a lot better than those goofballs.” No sanctimony. No scolding. A joke begets a joke in response.
On the twitters, there is a cohort of angry and self-righteous public defenders who will gather their tribe to defend their honor and swarm on anyone they perceive to be attacking them. By attacking, I mean anything less than adoration and gushing praise. They tell their stories to each other, always the hero or the victim, and they can’t hit the “love” button hard enough, addicted to the validation that comes from living in a world where never is heard a discouraging word.
But outside of their bubble, will the world come to appreciate the efforts of public defenders because they swarm and shriek at anyone who isn’t sufficiently obsequious? If they were half as good as they want to believe they are, they could take a joke and laugh it off. That they lost their minds over Jon Stewart’s quip calls Queen Gertrude’s reply to mind.
No one gets respect because you demand it. You get respect because you earn it. And if you’ve earned it, you can laugh at yourself without being outraged that someone, particularly someone as sympathetic to your cause as Jon Stewart, made a joke about your kind. And if you don’t realize that there are shitty public defenders just as there are great public defenders, then you might want to come to grips with reality. Getting a job as a PD does not make you a star or a hero. It’s what you do with that job that matters.
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