The left has constructed a legal machine designed to bankrupt its enemies. Conservatives must establish permanent defense infrastructure before the next wave of subpoenas and lawsuits arrives.
The Biden years revealed a stark truth: lawfare works, and the right remains far more vulnerable to it than the left. Stacked judiciaries, activist allies, and unprincipled prosecutors all contribute to this dynamic—but money matters most.
The left built this legal machine because it understood power dynamics. The right must do the same to recognize what happens when power goes unprotected. Lawsuits are costly; so too are investigations, subpoenas, demand letters, bar complaints, defamation claims, and congressional inquiries. The left discovered how to shift political disputes into legal battlegrounds, leveraging terrain overwhelmingly favorable to itself.
The left has nearly dominated major law firm culture. Despite President Trump’s early executive orders targeting this landscape, little shifted. The left maintains a vast network of pro bono and donor-funded legal organizations ready to defend allies and pursue enemies. Consider the Southern Poverty Law Center—a nearly billion-dollar entity that serves as an investigative engine for government action against political opponents. This is just one component in a much larger ecosystem that dwarfs anything available on the right.
Preparations are already underway for Democratic control of the House or Senate followed by the presidency in 2028. If Democrats win, the right will return to Biden-era challenges—with a critical difference: The left views its previous campaign as unfinished business. Its base believes Merrick Garland did not go far enough.
A single congressional subpoena, demand letter, defamation claim, bar complaint, or federal investigative request can trigger legal bills in the tens of thousands. Competent defense costs money—and those most likely to become targets often cannot afford it. During Biden’s presidency, several efforts raised funds for legal defense, but this model had limitations: only a few senior individuals benefited from donor generosity. The money rarely reached the broader class caught in political targeting machinery.
The reason is simple: lawyers are expensive. I witnessed this firsthand. A close friend—a senior White House official in his early 30s who had not attended the Capitol on January 6—received a subpoena from the January 6 committee and outreach from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was alone. High-cost attorneys representing high-profile clients offered quotes he could never afford just to manage the investigation. In short, he was effectively destroyed.
I provided him with pro bono representation for the January 6 committee and a daylong deposition. Weeks of preparation were required—costs that would have easily exceeded tens of thousands from even discounted outside firms. The story ended happily: my friend now works at the FBI. But this is one person’s experience. My organization, the Oversight Project, represents allies nationwide caught in weaponized targeting. More work remains before the next wave arrives.
The right must rethink legal defense. We can no longer hope to collect vast sums and spend them on a handful of high-priced outside lawyers. A serious movement requires a dedicated defense team. The fundamental issue is cost: the model cannot rely on hourly fees exceeding $1,000.
The left has built a corps of highly paid attorneys handling everything from major lawsuits to symbolic complaints over reflecting pools or Kennedy Center naming. Its financiers pay lawyers to sue and defend constantly. The right faces the opposite challenge—it must accept reality and build a nonprofit public defense network equivalent.
This may seem unfair to right-leaning lawyers who deserve million-dollar paydays in left-wing ecosystems. But a serious political movement must sustain itself by defending itself. The conservative ecosystem needs major structural reform: policy shops, communications firms, advocacy groups, and convening organizations have value—but the movement has too much of that compared with infrastructure needed to gain and maintain power. A legal defense unit is one of those necessities.
What would a public defender-style network for political allies on the right look like? The current model concentrates funds among high-profile defendants and expensive lawyers. The better approach would create permanent, full-time attorneys working on salary within a nonprofit structure—defending more people at lower costs. Some cases may still require outside counsel or hybrid approaches, but the goal is to build, credential, and develop a specialized legal bench for lawfare.
This bench should also capture political rewards the conservative legal movement has long monopolized: prominent appointments, elected office, and leadership roles. The era of prestigious Big Law careers automatically converting into political patronage must end unless they include sacrifice and service to the broader cause. Defense efforts should prioritize those most vulnerable—ICE officers, mid-level political appointees, local officials, young staffers, activists, and others without financial means.
The effort must also maintain integrity: resources should go only to cases involving genuine political weaponization—not white-collar crime, contract solicitation, self-dealing, or financial misconduct. This is not about shielding wrongdoing; it’s about ensuring actual ethical violations—rather than political speech or service to conservative causes—trigger professional consequences.
When one side imposes costs without meaningful pushback, it will continue doing so. When the other side develops institutional capacity to absorb those costs and impose consequences in return, the incentive structure shifts. A public defender-style legal network would create rapid-response representation when subpoenas, bar complaints, investigations, or lawsuits strike. It would develop expertise in constitutional, administrative, ethics, and First Amendment defenses tailored to political attacks. It would coordinate a nationwide roster of aligned counsel rather than leaving each target to negotiate with expensive firms.
Most importantly, it would operate on a charitable model directing resources to the most vulnerable clients—those who would otherwise be destroyed before the real fight begins.
The left built this legal machine because it understood power. The right must build one because it understands what happens when power goes undefended.
Mike Howell is president of the Oversight Project.
