What is it Like to Be an ABA Member?

One useful way of spotting the indefensible is that those writing an apologia for some action write around that topic but not on the question itself. A nice example of this is a Volokh Conspiracy post yesterday discussing one of the day's flood-the-zone stories: a letter from Andrew Ferguson, chairman of the FTC, stating that political appointees are barred from, inter alia, renewing existing ABA memberships, and prohibiting the agency from any spending to facilitate any employee's participation in an ABA event. The letter is an exemplary Trump administration missive written in the Trump administration house style. It's exemplary, among other things, in that it curries favor with the boss; how fitting that it was dated February 14. It is exemplary also in being deliberately provocative without being especially purposeful, in centralizing power and favoring it over expertise, and in being uneven and self-serving in application. (That prohibition on spending for participation in ABA events does not include commissioners or their staffs.) And its signs of the house style include repeated invocation of the personalist nature of the presidency (eight uses of the president's name in a little over two pages), breathless praise and puffery, bad writing, and bald dishonesty. (Remember: the bald dishonesty is the point. A more elegant lie would not serve the purpose of demonstrating loyalty. Like hypocrisy, it would pay tribute to virtue; and reserving a place for virtue might denote a dangerous independence.) 

In almost-defending the letter, the VC post argues that the ABA has had it coming for a long time, without ever getting to the rightness or wrongness, seriousness or silliness, of the "it." This is a justification in roughly the same way that one might accurately discuss the loud barking one's neighbor's dog and the need for it to be better behaved, while avoiding discussion of the fact that you dealt with the problem by poisoning the dog's food. 

I'm sympathetic to the criticisms of the ABA. I have belonged to the ABA since 2000. I have found it useless at best as a membership organization. Its function in my own life is minimal. The ABA Journal, which has had good moments in the past, is now so poor that it makes state bar magazines look good by comparison. The political leanings of the organization have long been evident. (Although, predictably given the rhetorical exaggeration of the house style, Ferguson's letter gets those leanings wrong. It's establishment liberal, not "leftist" or "radical left-wing," a distinction that Ferguson, a longstanding member of the establishment, ought to understand. For its entire history, the ABA has always only ever been either establishment liberal or establishment conservative.) I groan at some of its accreditation moves and at other policy proposals and ignore its amicus briefs. I remain a member for pretty typical reasons: one is simple inertia, and the other is that it occasionally does things in my area that I would like to know about. That second reason would be even more pertinent if I were in an area of law--say, antitrust--where bench, bar, and academy mix more often and productively. I would be interested in such matters even if I disliked many other aspects of the organization. As with, say, the Federalist Society, I might belong because I thought it put on some good events, or had some good sections or chapters, even if I found other chunks of the ABA objectionable or trivial. (And like the ABA, I belong to the Federalist Society most years, with lapses having more to do with inertia than the desire to make a statement.) It is an extremely weak-tie membership group. 

For those reasons, I could well imagine any administration criticizing the ABA or having no interest in working with it. (Although I expect that, in reality, this administration will often work with the ABA at multiple levels, while also attacking it and engaging in dumb-shows of this sort.) But that's not the "it" here. The "it" is a flat ban on membership in the organization for political underlings and a categorical refusal to subsidize even the most politically anodyne and practically valuable event participation by any employee. (Except, of course, for the commission's ruling class.) It is, as the letter's last paragraph makes clear, a literally and purely performative action. After years of performative exercises by administrations of both parties, one ought to be used to it, even as one notes the aggressively personalist and cumulatively authoritarian elements that distinguish the Trump administration. But one longs for the days of vaguely serious and non-trivial government, and vaguely serious and purposeful intellectual discussion directed at points of substance and significance.