It was an action many considered to be President Donald Trump’s revenge for the Steele dossier — locking out the Perkins Coie law firm through an executive order signed last week, directly calling out the firm for “dishonest and dangerous activity.”

The order suspended security clearances and terminated all federal contracts with the firm. Punishment indeed for a series of wrongs that included being the pass-through for Hillary Clinton’s campaign to pay for the dossier.

Obviously, this drew ire from those on the Left, but some on the Right were also nonplussed. “He is trying to defenestrate Perkins Coie to intimidate elite law firms from representing his opponents or plaintiffs who challenge his policies,” argued the editors of The Wall Street Journal. “This violates a bedrock principle of American law, which is that even the worst clients deserve representation.” Being a law firm, Perkins Coie did what it does best: run to a judge to have the restrictions overturned, although it used the services of “litigation powerhouse Williams & Connolly,” as the Journal described them.

In response, a Trump spokesman noted, “It is absurd that a billion-dollar law firm is suing to retain its access to government perks and handouts.”

Yet the situation creates bad optics for the administration, which is currently up to its eyeballs in lawsuits as desperate Democrats try to slow down the Trump train and maintain their funding spigots. For example, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell has been a thorn in Trump’s side. She not only refused to dismiss the cases of Proud Boys Nicholas Ochs and Nicholas DiCarlo with prejudice, despite President Trump’s pardon, but she also quickly sided with Perkins Coie, lecturing in a temporary restraining order that Trump’s EO “appears to be an instance of President Trump using taxpayer dollars [and] government resources to pursue what is a wholly personal vendetta.”

Naturally, the Democrats’ strategy has been one of running to friendly leftist district judges, who put up nationwide halts to various Trump initiatives. That’s a tactic that will likely draw a decision sooner or later from the Supreme Court, though a group of senators is rightly honing in on a group assisting many of these radical judicial activists: the American Bar Association.

A half-dozen Republican senators, led by Missouri’s Eric Schmitt, wrote a letter to ABA President William R. Bay, chiding his group as “a failed institution that is incapable of impartially rating nominees and making legislative recommendations.”

“As such,” the senators continued, “we will not consider any ABA recommendations on pending legislation or nominees, and we call upon our colleagues to do the same.”

It’s worth noting that the ABA rated 10 prospective Trump appointees “not qualified” during his first term, while nominees of both Joe Biden and Barack Obama sailed through without objection. In the senators’ letter to the ABA, they noted, “As we saw during the Biden Administration, the ABA’s ratings were little more than political endorsements for the most radical, left wing partisans. The ABA endorsed patently unqualified judicial nominees as ‘Qualified’ or ‘Well Qualified’ time and time again — including nominees that were so partisan that even the Democrat majority in the Senate could not confirm them.”

Further, Federalist Executive Editor Joy Pullmann explains, “The ABA deeply affects the U.S. lawyer pipeline and licensing system, accrediting law schools, rating judges, and weaponizing lawyer discipline. Its rabid leftism means the ABA systematically ratchets the entire U.S. legal system against the U.S. Constitution. That’s an existential threat to the country, as most recently illustrated by the dozens of federal judges the ABA helped advance who hate our supreme law so much they rule that the elected executive cannot control the unelected executive branch. With judges like those the ABA advances, the United States will quickly discard what remnants of our constitutional order persist.”

Our nation is built on the Rule of Law, and one feature (or bug) is that we have a judicial branch that looks at its role in upholding the Constitution in a myriad of ways. Some judges are strict originalists who look at how the Constitution was written and the thoughts of the Founders before making their decisions. Others have the worldview that they are in charge, and there’s surely some penumbra in the Constitution (or some other law from around the world) that agrees with them. Some believe it’s a “living Constitution” that can change with the times, as opposed to the originalists who believe it to be the standard to judge current times. Right now, President Trump’s opponents have plenty in the “living Constitution” camp to choose from, thanks to Democrat presidents who embraced the ABA and their guidelines for 12 of the last 16 years.

Perhaps now is not the time to pick on a particular law firm, but rather, go to the root of the problem. To work on subverting the system from below by cutting the DEI financing spigot from higher education would be the more productive and politically popular play.