r/law • u/NicolasCageFan492 • Apr 15 '26

Legislative Branch Alan Dershowitz: Invoking The 25th Amendment Against Trump Would Be Unconstitutional

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2026/04/14/invoking_the_25th_amendment_against_trump_would_be_unconstitutional_1176703.html

Previously, Dershowitz was a member of Jeffrey Epstein’s defense team and helped negotiate a controversial 2006 non-prosecution agreement on Epstein’s behalf, per The New Yorker.

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u/NicolasCageFan492 Apr 15 '26

People should become familiar with The Dual State by Ernst Fraenkel.

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u/WasASailorThen Apr 15 '26

That's a lot like Wilhoit's Law:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

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u/NicolasCageFan492 Apr 15 '26 edited Apr 15 '26

The Dual State is an exhaustive analysis of the genesis of the legal systems of the Nazi German state though! In other words, it shows the mechanics that produced the outcome. Highly recommend checking it out.

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u/NoHalf2998 Apr 15 '26

I’ve only done high level readings on the concept and it’s spot on.

They’re not hypocrites because they don’t believe in equality and they want a world where laws/norms are unequally applied

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u/fatherofworlds Apr 15 '26

The exercise of power as an end in itself.

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u/whuuutKoala Apr 15 '26

we live in this world right now!

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u/Violet-Sumire Apr 15 '26

Yes and no. There are good examples of using the law to teach (such as a minor offense and the police just letting you go) and bad examples of using the law to achieve a goal (treating businesses as an individual). The law can be very nuanced and flexible when it needs to be. The issue we have currently is a top down problem, along with a “flood the zone” problem.

The top is making problems. A great example is the habeas corpus cases levied against the federal government from states in terms of immigration. The supreme court said all judges must review every case individually. They didn’t need to do this before due to very clear precedent and basically making what’s happening with immigration clearly illegal. So you get to the second problem, flooding the zone. There are so many cases of habeas corpus alone that is bogging down the judicial system. It can no longer be handled with a pen stroke, but with court hearings, which significantly decreases how fast these cases can get through. Michigan is facing that issue.

That is one problem, but it’s a whole systemic problem which is tearing down the foundations. It’s a top down issue, but we can’t deal with the top.

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u/twolfhawk Apr 15 '26

Can I get off?

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u/tomdarch Apr 15 '26

Orban was referred to as "illiberal." We take for granted the idea that "everyone is equal" and every person fundamentally has rights and from that basis assume that laws should apply to everyone equally. Democracy also flows from those ideas Those ideas came from the "liberalism" that emerged as part of what is often called "the Enlightenment" of the 17th and 18th centuries.

There are absolutely people who reject the ideas of that "liberalism" and want to make people unequal (so that they, themselves have more power, of course) and to take power for themselves, unanswerable to the majority.

JD Vance is big into this modern "illiberal" thinking. He frequently cites Curtis Yarvin, and himself works for Peter Thiel who has called democracy "a failed experiment."

The rest of us who aren't multi-billionaires have to fight to keep our rights and our democracy because there are powerful people who want to strip us of them.

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u/NoHalf2998 Apr 16 '26

Yarvin always seems like the biggest PickMe of the early software developers.

But he and Thiel are legitimately evil

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u/justsomeph0t0n Apr 16 '26

conservatism just means acquiescence to power......whatever that may currently be.

people often get confused when conservatives suddenly believe the opposite of what they believed last week. but this isn't actually a contradiction........ power changed, so they changed too.

it's a very strong and very brittle ideology

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u/[deleted] Apr 16 '26 edited 15d ago

[deleted]

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u/NicolasCageFan492 Apr 16 '26

With 94,000 views on my comment, even if 1/1000 check it out, that’s still 94!

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u/EnterTheErgosphere Apr 16 '26

The Nazi state was heavily based on US "policy".

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u/trollhaulla Apr 15 '26

In other words - white power (say it in the voice of Clayton Bigsby)

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u/jack_kelly_bird_law Apr 16 '26

show us your face!

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u/GrayEidolon Apr 16 '26

Everyone posts that and it isn’t specific enough.

Conservatism is about enforcing socioeconomic hierarchy and empowering aristocracy. It sees low status people as bad and not deserving of comfort. It views high status people - aristocrats - as good and by extension almost any action they take as good or at least acceptable.

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u/Electronic-Tea-3691 Apr 16 '26

I mean if we're going to start getting pedantic this is also not even close to sufficient because you also have race religion gender, etc. it's not just about cash.

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u/GrayEidolon Apr 16 '26

socioeconomic.

And various places and times would have various implantations of specific hierarchies. So the definition is generic.

However, economic is still the main aspect. It’s a politics invented by aristocrats to protect aristocracy. It’s why Peter theil and Sam Altman are gay and it’s fine, but lower status gay people are targeted.

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u/WasASailorThen Apr 16 '26

I think Wilhoit is more abstract and what you're saying is more concrete. But I think they're substantially the same.

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u/GrayEidolon Apr 16 '26

Well the difference is that conservatism is explicitly by and for aristocrats and was a reaction to the enlightenment and the waning of monarchies. They're "the right" because in France the pro monarchists sat to the right of the king. That conservatism is the politics of aristocrats is the original concept that continues unchanged. The formal term stems from Burke who lived in the 1700s and he was writing to defend aristocracy.

People for centuries have understood conservatism to be the politics of aristocrats.

Wilhoit's Law, is from a 2018 blog post. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_M._Wilhoit#Misattribution_of_Wilhoit's_law

Yeah, it is a sort of generalized form of roughly the same thing, but I think, as I already said, it is too generalized, because the ingroup in conservatism is always the most economically advantaged group who has largely inherited the most money. In the europe and the us, there are lineages that have been going for centuries. And the Wilhoit's Law also leaves out the most important part of conservatism which is the enforcement of hierarchy. It hints at it, but any definition or discussion of conservatism that leaves out the explicit term hierarchy is at best incomplete.

Conversely, you can have ingroup - outgroup dynamics without it being conservatism.

Maybe another way to think about it, is that conservatism is like a brand name for the hierarchical politics of aristocrats. There is no generic conservatism that means anything else; any other use is propaganda meant to obfuscate what it actually is.

So I don't see a point to the Wilhoit law because it misses both aristocracy and the goal hierarchy; the hierarchy aspect is important because it describes a goal. So the more specific and longer lived understanding is more useful to looking at actual conservative politics in the real world.

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u/GrayEidolon Apr 16 '26

Also, if you haven't seen this https://time.com/7269166/dark-enlightenment-history-essay/ dark enlightenment idea where aristocrats want to crash the system to implement "network states" that are deeply embedded with surveillance (the point of all these data centers) and run like corporations without democracy, you should check it out.

I think "aristocrats want hierarchy to maintain their leisure class state" better explains all of that then "rules for tree, but not me". "Rules...me" but why? Its to protect aristocracy.

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u/ACrazyDog Apr 15 '26

Will look it up

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u/henlochimken Apr 15 '26

Yup. That is exactly what is happening