Senator Durbin Reminds Us that Woke Trial Lawyers and Senate Democrats Are Still Attached at the Hip

In case anyone needed a reminder of how closely tied Senate Democrats are to America’s woke trial lawyers, look no further than the recently returned Senate Judiciary Committee’s Questions for the Record (QFRs) from the ranking member, Senator Richard Durbin, to Dan Burrows, the nominee to be the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy.

Senate QFRs are meant to explore nominees’ views on the law, on the duties of the position for which the president selected them, and on their fitness for the office. Justice Department nominations often include questions regarding constitutional law and Supreme Court precedent. Senator Durbin devoted fewer questions to such topics than to probing whether Burrows had relationships with the Left’s favorite bogeymen among conservative groups, including the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and the Alliance Defending Freedom. That is typical from Senate Democrats.

Tellingly, Durbin also devoted six detailed questions in his QFRs to Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach’s termination of the notorious billboard lawyers at Morgan & Morgan, which occurred while Burrows was Kobach’s chief deputy. Echoing the original liberal pushback on the termination, most of Durbin’s questions referenced the firm’s politics, including more than one mention of its political donations. “Did the donations of Morgan & Morgan’s leadership play any role in the office’s decision to fire the firm?” was one question. Another asked:

You and Attorney General Kobach claimed Morgan & Morgan was fired for performance issues, but canceled the contract using a convenience clause, rather than for cause. If the firm was fired for performance reasons, why did the Attorney General’s Office not terminate the firm for cause?

That was followed by:

Morgan & Morgan founder John Morgan stated that the decision to fire the firm was “all about politics, and the people and taxpayers have suffered.” How much taxpayer money did the office use in related litigation costs after terminating the contract with the firm?

These were transparent attempts to imply that the termination was political and cost the state. That’s pretty rich, because the politics was all in how billboard lawyers like Morgan & Morgan even got the work in the first place. Most states don’t turn to accident attorneys—firms built on slip-and-fall cases and car wrecks—for complex consumer protection litigation.

Durbin asking about this episode is quite revealing. As a reminder, Kansas terminated Morgan & Morgan in 2023, as did Iowa. I wrote about it at that time, noting it as a great example of a win for states. Those terminations cemented a trend that had started with Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen in 2021, and which most recently saw Attorneys General in Alaska and Utah terminate similarly notorious trial lawyers at Motley Rice for conflicts of interest and confidentiality violations.

Burrows was constrained by his confidentiality obligations from revealing internal information about the representation of a client. But he was able to reveal that “the publicly available contract between the State of Kansas and Morgan & Morgan allowed the Director of Purchases” in the AG’s office “to terminate the contract ‘for any reason’ when he determined ‘that the termination [was] in the best interest of the State of Kansas.’”

And to Durbin’s question about litigation costs after the firm was terminated, Burrows added this devastating observation: “As for John Morgan [the firm’s founder] and the supposed suffering of the people and the taxpayers, he did not seem particularly concerned about that when, as has been publicly reported, his firm refused for a time to return the whole client file to the state in what seemed to me like an effort to sabotage the case.”

If the Morgan & Morgan termination taught us anything, it was how compromised most of these trial lawyers truly are. Post-termination documents revealed threats of bar complaints amid wildly unethical behavior. According to reports, the firm removed document review codes from 10,000 documents and withheld work product including spreadsheets and transcripts that belonged to Kansas.

Maybe that shouldn’t be shocking, since the firm was hit with sanctions in federal court in Wyoming for using AI-generated fake cases in a lawsuit against Walmart.

Everything that has come out since shows Kansas was in the right to fire them.

That does not seem to matter to Senator Durbin, who is still trying to revisit this issue and fight for his trial lawyer buddies years later. It’s not hard to see why. Trial lawyers have become the front-line fighters for liberal priorities in recent years. They are launching climate change litigation against energy companies, suing gun manufacturers, and otherwise pushing liberal policy priorities in courthouses across America on issues they can’t win democratically. This isn’t consumer protection. It’s lawfare in service of the progressive agenda.

And that is before even considering how many millions trial lawyers have poured into Democratic coffers. I previously explored how such firms have shown their true colors as an ideological monolith. That included Morgan & Morgan, the employees of which were shown to have contributed 98.8% of their 2024-cycle donations to Democratic presidential candidates, major party organizations, and campaign contribution aggregators.

Make no mistake: The shady trial lawyers of this country are locked at the hip with Senate Democrats like Durbin and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. They push for the same policies, scratch each other’s backs, and cycle money back and forth. For too long, woke trial lawyers were able to hide this and traffic in work for conservative states, despite being unfit for the work in question.

But that has changed. Trial lawyers have come under sustained assault in the states, losing their ability to funnel money from red state contracts into Democratic campaigns and progressive litigation. And right on cue, Senator Durbin springs into action in defense of his friends and donors. As so often happens, Durbin is on the wrong side of the facts and law here. But it’s another reminder of how tight Senate Democrats and trial lawyers are—and how good it truly is that the trial lawyers have been facing setbacks from red-state attorneys general.