Our latest guest on Q&A is a “legal eagle,” as I say in my introduction.
He is Gregg Nunziata, the executive director of SRL—the Society for the Rule of Law. The organization serves an important purpose.
Gregg worked in the Justice Department. And for the Senate Judiciary Committee. And for the Senate Republican Policy Committee. And for Senator Marco Rubio. And so on.
He was in the heart of the Republican legal world.
These days, he has one overriding concern: to defend the rule of law.
Yes, and that’s a fine overriding concern to have.
At the outset of our Q&A, I ask Gregg, “What is the rule of law?” I will paraphrase his answer (though closely):
I think the rule of law, most basically, is the idea of fair play—that we, as citizens, as individuals, live in a system that has rules for resolving disputes.
For most of human history, the weak have been at the mercy of the strong, or the whim of a leader. That is still true for most of the world today. The rule of law is a great equalizer that puts all this aside and says, “We’re going to resolve our differences peacefully and through process.” …
Everything that human beings value—everything that Americans value and maybe take for granted—rests on the rule of law. Prosperity, physical security, our liberties—it all depends on the rule of law.
My remark is, “Yes, it’s kind of the ballgame” (and I’m not so sure about the “kind of”).
The Society for the Rule of Law was founded by a bunch of conservative Republicans, basically, who were concerned about what was happening on “the legal right,” as Gregg Nunziata says, and on the right generally.
What was happening? Well, you know: a collapse of principle.
Gregg and I talk a bit about his upbringing, his education, his formation. In the 1980s, there were two people who made a deep, deep impression on him: a president, Ronald Reagan, and a Supreme Court justice, Antonin Scalia.
After 9/11, Gregg wanted to work in government somehow—and he eventually got to Washington.
About one of the people he worked for, I tell him the following:
Marco Rubio may have been my favorite politician in America—certainly top five. I have no idea who he is. There’s “no there there.” I have a better grasp on Lindsey Graham! I have no idea who Marco Rubio is, except for the ambition part. And I absolutely adored him.
Gregg says,
I worked for three senators directly. I worked with many others, but with three directly. The first, I respected; the second, I loved; but the third, I believed in.
The first was Arlen Specter, from Pennsylvania. The second was John Thune, who is now the majority leader. And the third was Marco Rubio. …
I really believed in him and his vision. I worked closely with him for four years, and very much wanted him to win the presidential nomination in 2016. A part of me died that year. I mean, it was really disillusioning.
Gregg remembers a fellow who “would speak really, really eloquently about the power of democracy, about the importance of international alliances, about the importance of USAID …”
Yeah.
At some point, Gregg and I talk about the Justice Department. I had always understood it to be an institution serving the country as a whole. Now it is simply the president’s legal shop—an instrument of his will. They have hung a banner of him—of his visage—on the department itself, physically.
Gregg says: “civic blasphemy.”
He also says that lawyers working for the government once understood themselves to be lawyers first, meaning that they told the president when something was undoable because it was unlawful.
Autres temps, autres mœurs.
Gregg says,
I hear regularly from conservative law students that the law doesn’t matter, that we live in a post-legal regime, a post-constitutional regime, or that everything is just about power. Or you hear that law is just an elaborate ruse of the Left to suppress traditionalism and Western civilization.
If you can’t count on a conservative law student to believe in law, you’re in a rough spot. …
I’m just scandalized by the radicalism we see in the Republican Party and from young self-styled conservative intellectuals who don’t want to conserve a thing but want to burn everything down. That worldview has been wrong since Paris in 1789.
Yet Gregg does not despair—and he works every day toward “American renewal,” as he puts it.
For my money, Gregg Nunziata is one of the most important lawyers in the country. He could be at a high, high echelon of power, in the Republican Party, in the Trump administration. All he had to do was play along.
Instead, he heads this Society for the Rule of Law. I’m grateful for the guy, and I know you’ll enjoy getting to know him.
