On keeping the dimmer switches turned up as far as possible

During the previous Trump horror show, I paid considerable attention to what Ben Wittes of the Washington Brookings Institution think tank was churning out -- the legal insights and later his delightful escapades such as projecting the Ukrainian flag on the Russian embassy in DC in April 2022.

With Trump's election. it's time to come back to Wittes' serious legal insights, found in posts headlined The Situation at Lawfare alongside many other contributors. He's not sanguine about the prospects for the existing constitutional system of ostensible "checks and balances" weathering the Trump storm well.

... political courage is precisely what the framers cannot bequeath us. 

... Put simply, we will work to cut through the noise and help guide people as to what issues are genuinely of concern and how to understand those issues on a granular level.

Somehow, I don't think his pious incantations of non-partisanship and legal expertise are likely to be enough to keep a Matt Gaetz-led Justice Department from coming after Brookings, but these folks do have a lot of friends in DC places. 

Anyway, here's Wittes's opening salvo on the role he envisions for lawyers trying to protect the rule of law: 

What are we to do about the lawful democratic assaults? There is no simple answer to this question—only the vaguest of guideposts. But I will offer a few of those guideposts. 

First, litigation is an important instrument. Justice delayed is justice denied, goes the old saying, and the same is true of injustice. Tying things up in court doesn’t always make them stop. But it often ameliorates them, and the delays themselves can be salutary. ...

Second, litigation is an insufficient instrument and is emphatically not a substitute for politics. In the end, the fundamental problem here is that more than half of American voters asked for what they are now going to get. Somehow, those of us who see this decision as a profound blow to a democratic system need to persuade others of that. ...

Third, every one of these lawful predations is different and will require a different strategy. A bad nominee to head the Department of Homeland Security [subsequently this became Kristi Noem, no qualifications governor of North Dakota best known for shooting her dog] is not the same as a corrupt pardon. An executive order implementing Schedule F is not the same as an investigation of a political opponent motivated by animus. And none of these are the same as a tax break to wealthy people passed through a Congress whose Republican majority loves to pass tax breaks for wealthy people and would do it with any Republican president. ...

One final note: There is no single marker of success here. There’s no simple test I can articulate that will tell us we have succeeded. Democracy and the rule of law are not binaries, light switches that get turned on or off. They are more like dimmer switches, which can be turned up or down. The goal here is not to let the dimmer be turned down too low, to not let the light go out, to fight for every lumen, and to do it honestly and with a constant awareness that not all democratic values run in the same direction.

My emphasis.