Steve HEyWEIRD… Gets EVERYTHING Dead Wrong — About Prof. Anastaplo [Including… His Surname.]

 I don’t often mention any of the other delusionary writers at Powerline, not because they aren’t worthy of debunking — but precisely because debunking all of their collected nonsense [often hateful nonsense, in truth]… would consume the bulk of any competent lawyer’s day — every day.

And so I generally “leave them be.”

But this one, I must counter for the record. Tonight, Steve purports to offer a recounting of Prof. Anastaplo’s life and work. Specifically, he quotes some of his earliest writing on the Nixon impeachment’s earliest stages. [In doing so, he completely ignores all of the professor’s later (post-1973-era) writings and speeches on that impeachment. That is dishonest enough, to merit mention, but there is more. So much more.]

As a young lawyer, I had the privilege of knowing the professor, personally — and in several professional capacities [that will remain unspoken, since death has… closed his mouth]. Steve even mis-spells his name. Disgusting.

Suffice it to say that Steve HEyWEIRD’s shameless — and incorrect as a matter of law, and fact — appropriating just one of his writings, in isolation — while ignoring all others — is meant to offer a foolish bolstering of Trump’s chances… and is… well, reprehensible.

Not terribly surprisingly, Steve also gets the central historical facts — about the professor wrong. He was never “disbarred.” He was refused a license in the first instance, for failure to sign a what amounted to an unconstitutional loyalty oath.

In the slowly meandering river that is the fuller passage of time, the Illinois lawyers’ regulatory world cleared up the lawless affront to his person, and reputation — and then, long after the death of Joseph McCarthy, himself — granted him a law license with accolades, too numerous to recount here, to boot. [In fact, George privately declined the license when it was (much later) first offered by Illinois, in order to impress upon that later sitting Illinois Supreme Court… the error its prior members had committed. In sum, Hugo Black was right about George.]

I heard George lecture many times in public — and none of what Steve wrote rings true.

In addition, and more directly, I sat in his small cubby of an office at Loyola, and over stacks of his notes — discussed with him many of the ideas that animated his views of Con. Law — over slowly cooling coffees, in old, chipped ceramic mugs… in the middle of many a gray wintery afternoon, on Chicago’s near north Gold Coast — ones not unlike those I just walked from the train, out into… tonight… thinking of him.

 So yes, Steve is… here, a charlatan… plain and simple. That’s as charitable as I can possibly be,  as angry as I am, here tonight. George was a great man, a man of principles, and ideas… and a friend.

Steve has gravely insulted my long dead friend’s reputation — in essentially the mirror image of the way the Illinois Supreme Court insulted him, by first refusing him a license… about  70 years ago now. [And, as originally posted — Hayward had mis-spelled his name as “Anastapilo” (now corrected overnight). Par — for his sloppy, lazy course. Thus my turnabout with his sur-name. Childish? Perhaps — but deservedly so, in my humble estimation.]

Steve should apologize. But — like John — he never will. His vain pride won’t allow for that.

O N W A R D.