Planting My Standard

In his Farewell Address, George Washington warned us that political parties would use the Spoils System to politicize our civil service, usurp power, and destroy the very democracy that gave them power:

They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.

However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

If you don’t see Washington’s warning coming to life in the city that bears his name, you are either too far away to see it, too low on the list of the usurpers’ priorities to feel it, or too stultified and tribalized to object to it. But from inside the government over the last year, I have watched the unthinkable happen.

They are purging ethical civil servants from our government, starting with its leading lawyers and law enforcement officers, and have left unmolested–for now–only those who obey without question and without regard to the law.

They are flouting the laws our representatives have enacted over two centuries, and they are testing our reaction to their violations of the courts’ orders.

They have driven ethical prosecutors out of the Justice Department and replaced them with little Frieslers and Vyshinskys to persecute dissenters.

They collect our taxes but withhold them from the people of disobedient states, ignoring Congress’s constitutional power to appropriate them.

They abuse their limited powers to flood the streets with soldiers and masked police, in an apparent training exercise for the suppression of peaceful protest.

They are infringing on our freedom to speak and hear dissent by corrupting the money, interests, and technology of a few opportunist oligarchs to erase dissenters from our civil service and our screens.

They refuse to seat an elected member of Congress to conceal culpability for the rape of children, and as a test of our reaction to them doing so on a far greater scale in 2026.

They try to steal elections, and then they lie about it.

Maybe all of this is too far advanced to stop, but nothing in this life will matter more than how our children remember where we stood in this time.

For those who know me from my writings on behalf of oppressed people in another, faraway place, this will necessarily mean that I must devote the limited hours of my days to defending the freedom of my own homeland. I can only fight one dictatorship at a time.

An oath to support and defend the Constitution is an oath that every soldier, civil servant, and lawyer takes. I have now taken six of them, and each of them is sacred to me. Each represented a step from severe poverty to a place of comfort, then privilege, as a lawyer and Senior Executive in our government, in a democracy to which I owe everything I have. And I have always known that obligations were attached to those comforts and privileges.

I do not read the words of my oaths as mere passive admonitions against violating the Constitution, but as affirmative obligations to actively support and defend it. Now, the third branch of our government is the last line of defense against the transgressions of the second. After having humbly obeyed the lawful orders of so many presidents I didn’t vote for–including Donald Trump during his first administration–I can scarcely believe what I say next: I can no longer keep my oaths from inside any government he controls.

A few pockets remain within it where it is still possible to act ethically and faithfully to our oaths. If you’re in one of them, stay while you can, and do what you can. But I have decided that this government is no place for a lawyer. Private practice will be my public service now. It opens tomorrow. Initially, I will return to my criminal defense roots, doing the work that always made me happiest, if a bit sooner than when I’d planned to do it. Because I was chosen for the Criminal Justice Act panel for the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, I’m in the fortunate position of being able to choose only those other, non-appointed cases and clients whose causes I believe to be the most deserving and the closest to my heart.

The other clients I represent will be federal employees and uniformed service members in the District of Columbia and Virginia, where I’m now licensed. They will be those who are facing retaliation for their political views, for having the “wrong” color skin or religion, or for blowing the whistle on corruption or abuses of power. They will be those who’ve been forced back to an office, despite their disabilities, suffering needless pain while doing work they had done perfectly well from their homes for years.

How my practice changes in the coming years will depend on my capacity to give every client the zealous representation they deserve, the direction of this government, and the independence of our judiciary. With time, and once my family’s finances stabilize, I will also have the luxury of doing more of that work pro bono. But I have chosen to plant my standard and fix my bayonet here on this line, in the manner and in the courts where lawyers have undertaken that duty.

You can find me at joshua@stantonlawpllc.com. If you live in this area, and if you know anyone who finds herself in any of those positions, you will have my deepest appreciation for referring that person to me, and you will also have my commitment that their rights will be in the hands of someone with decades of experience and an uncompromising dedication to justice.