Who deserves legal representation – the American people, or their sworn enemies? To the Atlanta, Georgia law firm of King & Spalding, the answer most emphatically is only the latter.

That is the message sent by that firm as we get news that the head of King & Spalding’s appellate practice group, former Solicitor General Paul Clement, has resigned from the firm after King & Spalding backed out of Clement’s representation of the United States House of Representatives in defending the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

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No one likes child abusers. Before the Supreme Court decided to codify in our Constitution the European notion that child molesters should suffer repeated rape in prison rather than be put to death, Louisiana made child molestation a death penalty offense.

However, as any conservative knows, “for the children” is a codeword for “this is going to hurt.” Anyone who watched daycare workers and parents put through Hell because overzealous prosecutors, usually without children, wanted some plum prosecutions and found a convenient target, knows the story. (I’m looking at you, Janet Reno. But only reflected in a well-buffed shield.) The cases follow a familiar pattern: A child is locked in a room with intimidating authority figures — police, teachers, or some combination — and told to simply tell them where daddy/mommy/the teacher/the daycare provider touched them. If the child denies it, well, she must be scared of punishment, right? Just keep asking. Lean in a little closer. When she asks to leave, well, she must still be scared she’ll get in trouble. Make clear she can’t leave just yet, but as soon as she tells you where she was touched/where the animal sacrifice was held (that’s not a joke), someone will get her something to drink and everything will be ok. The police/teachers are just here to help. Just talk. Then you can go.

Once she talks — even if she recants — the target is basically looking at a certain conviction, because child abuse is so terrible, juries rush to verdict, and defense attorneys know this. A parent’s child becomes a gateway to ripping away his civil rights and the presumption of innocence. Every attorney charged with defending an accused child molester knows he’d have a better chance defending a charge of genocide. I’ve been there, and God knows I’m not the only one.

Fortunately, we have nine robed masters who look all primed to set a muddy balancing test for prosecutors to follow in the future. The Washington Post tells us that the Supreme Court is going to pretend to care about an accused child molester’s rights. Here are sketches of the facts — facts that are extremely common in these cases.

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On Friday, someone emailed me with a link to this story about a “compromise” executive order issued by President Obama pertaining to conscience protections for workers in the health care industry, and asked for my opinion. The only answer I could give at the time was that I was not sure what the effect of the executive order would be, but that I would try to ruminate on it over the weekend to see if I came up with anything. After spending the weekend doing just that, I am afraid that I am no closer to the answer. I suspect, as with many Executive Orders, that the critical details will be answered in the course of implementation. Given the Obama Administration’s general hostility towards the views of honest pro-lifers, this is not a comforting prospect.

By way of background, nurses and doctors working in facilities receiving federal funding have long received theoretical statutory conscience protection preventing them from being forced to participate in abortions and similar procedures. I say “theoretical” because the law has been horribly enforced over the years. In an effort to combat this, the Bush administration issued an executive order in the waning days of Bush’s Presidency which expanded this conscience protection to all health care workers and expanded the range of procedures to which health care workers could (in essence) conscientiously object.

The Washington Post article notes the usual lines of attack that were employed against this Executive Order, claiming that it would have shielded workers who, for example, refused to provide fertilization treatments for single women, or (somewhat ridiculously) hospital janitors who refused to clean a hospital room after an abortion. Although the Order was certainly not that broad, it was definitely intended to expand coverage to people such as CNAs, Pharmacists, pharmacy techs, and the like, and would have at least arguably encompassed dispensing birth control pills, etc. From what I can tell, the new Obama Executive Order strips all these extra protections away and reduces the coverage of the Executive Order only to doctors and nurses, and covered procedures only to abortions and sterilizations.

Of course, wrangling over the precise language in the Executive Order is most likely a circus sideshow to where the real fight will lie, which is in the enforcement. For instance, the immigration laws we have on the books right now are quite strict; however, they are widely (and correctly) viewed as a joke because of decades of lax enforcement. And given what we know about the Obama administration’s hostility to honest pro-life convictions, it seems inevitable that health care workers will honest conscientious objections to participating in abortion or the distribution of arbortifacient medications will continue to live in fear of their jobs, despite clear Federal law indicating that they should not.

There is no greater threat to the rule of law in this country than unaccountable trial judges. Although appellate judges and Supreme Court justices (both State and Federal) get more press and more publicity, the simple fact is that they actually hear an infinitesimal number of cases compared to the workload of trial judges, and even when they do, they usually only make one or two decisions per case, whereas trial judges make scores of them. No one knows this fact better than unscrupulous trial judges, who frankly count on the fact that (in some systems) less than one per cent of their decisions will ever be reviewed by any appellate level court. Any trial lawyer will tell you that the cost and delay of appeal essentially make the trial judge God within his own courtroom – but he won’t tell you this out loud for fear that a trial judge somewhere might overhear him.

Take for example the case of Judge Dean Worcester. Judge Worcester apparently believes, contrary to the law, that illegal immigrants who are convicted of crimes should not be deported back to their country of origin. He has therefore, on four separate occasions, used an obscure procedure called the writ of coram vobis to reopen the cases of illegal immigrants who were scheduled for deportation. The only problem is that the writ of coram vobis is only available to correct clerical errors and omissions of fact. Judge Worcester was using the writ to examine whether the illegal immigrants in question were denied their constitutional right to effective assistance of counsel – the allegation in this case being that the defendants’ lawyers had failed to advise them that pleading guilty to a crime would result in their deportation.

The Supreme Court of Virginia unanimously ruled that the procedure employed by Judge Worcester to reopen these cases was improper and that the writ of coram vobis could not be used to relitigate these cases. Unanimously. This is of course supposed to be the end of the inquiry for all lower courts in the state, especially trial courts. Judge Worcester disagrees: