What is in common between college football players and attorneys

I was reading an article on unionization of NFL college football players by George Leef, and one phrase really struck me:

"In no other job does a worker's ability to remain on the job depend on a factor having nothing to do with his or her job performance".

That was about football players, and that was about academic performance of those same football players.

I would disagree that "ability to remain on the job depend[s] on a factor having nothing to do with his or her job performance" for college football players - or for any other college athletes.

After all, they are students who were admitted into college on an athletic scholarship, and the scholarship requires them to maintain a certain academic standing to remain students. 

If they drop out of college, not being able to maintain their academic standing, they drop out of the job.

Because, otherwise, if it is simply "a job", it should be a separate job, with hiring and firing process, not a "kind of a job" acquired through application for an athletic scholarship.

Apparently, student athletes are in college to get not only to play football, but also to receive college education, so the phrase about their remaining on the job depends on a factor (academic performance) unrelated to the actual performance on the job is somewhat stretched.

But, what drew my attention to that particular phrase was also that the "no other job" argument seems to be even more incorrect.

Lawyers are yet another such job. 

In this blessed profession, and especially in civil rights litigation, the better you are, the more your are eligible to be kicked out on some contrived disciplinary charge - and the better you dig for evidence of governmental misconduct - like, for example, attorney Christina Mire from Louisiana did - the more you are prone to be kicked out for actions "interfering with proper administration of justice".

Just another paradox of the profession.

And, by the way, while the ABA paid lip service to the fact that attorneys must be entitled to the same 1st Amendment rights as anybody else, and to a right to do their job criticizing a judge in motions to recuse - even though there are hints dropped that attorney Mire's criticism of a judge - who, as I described before in a blog:

1. did not disclose a disqualifying conflict of interest;
2. had the court stenographer fight and even sue Christine Mire in order not to give her minutes from a hearing where such conflict of interest was supposed to be, but was not disclosed;
3. and, when the court did order disclosure of the minutes,
4. the audio file was sent to a professional technician to "splice" (add, glue in) a piece of audio file, and the judge's disclosure of conflict of interest (that Christine Mire who was present at the hearing says was never mentioned by the judge) was put into the audio file and into the minutes.

That was major league fraud on behalf of the judge and everybody who was helping her.

The judge was supposed to be taken off the bench and criminally prosecuted for this.

Yet, the judge was elevated to an appellate court, and, instead, attorney Mire was suspended for a year - and made to pay for "costs" of the fabricated disciplinary proceedings against her, on the shameless complaint of that same judge.  The government made Christine Mire, as a measure of "protection of consumers" (because that's the declared reason for existence of attorney licensing in the first place) to pay around $30,000 for being right when the judge was wrong, exactly as Judge Andrew Napolitano describes in this book:

So, being kicked off the job FOR BEING RIGHT is, same as George Leef says about football players, a "factor having nothing to do with his or her job performance".

In fact, being kicked off the job for doing the job well is counter-intuitive.

And, in this case, illegal.

But who cares, right?

The ABA ran a lip-service piece about Christine Mire's case, ran it only after Christine Mire was reinstated as an attorney.

At the very same time as the ABA ran the piece on Christine Mire's fate, my certiorari on the very same subject - punishment of an attorney for making a motion to recuse a judge while the attorney was right, punishment that is being increasingly imposed on civil rights attorneys and is widening the justice gap in the U.S. - was pending with the U.S. Supreme Court.

Had the U.S. Supreme Court taken the case, it then would have had to decide in my favor - its own precedents were on my side.

But, the ABA did not consider it worth its time to support the certiorari, and the U.S. Supreme Court, including Justice Sonya Sotomayor whose personal statements about the justice gap I quoted in the certiorari petition, refused to review the petition without an explanation.

Instead, the ABA continues to treat wrongfully suspended and disbarred attorneys, suspended and disbarred for being right when the government is wrong as not worthy to be part of the ABA, and that applies to civil rights attorneys subject to persecution by courts within the U.S. and by foreign governments - in other words, the ABA distances from wrongful suspensions and disbarments in order not to put itself into a situation when it has to criticize judges, as a matter of cowardly and self-serving self-preservation.

Because, the ABA's president recently produced a formula in connection with President Trump's criticism of a wrong and corrupt decision of the 9th Circuit and of the underlying district court decision:

to criticize a judge = to attack the U.S. Constitution.

No, we cannot have that.

We cannot "attack the U.S. Constitution" by criticizing those who violate it.

Especially when it can hit us in the pocket - as it is in the case of the ABA.

So, as things are now, since the ABA did not consider it important to support a certiorari about the use of disciplinary proceedings to remove from the reach of consumers a civil rights attorney for doing their job and making a motion to recuse for an indigent client where the case so required - and since the U.S. Supreme Court similarly refused to uphold its own "mandatory" precedent - the country's litigants' rights to impartial judicial review will continue to be illusory and resting upon the unlikely chance that an attorney will sacrifice himself or herself in order to help their client.

I will quote from my certiorari petition:

"Litigants cannot seriously rely upon a federal right that can be secured only by an attorney willing to sacrifice his or her entire investment into his law education and career, and his own and his family's lifetime's well-being for one client".

But that, ladies and gentlemen, is now "the law" in the U.S.

And being good is a "factor" qualifying a lawyer in this country for being deprived of a right to work.

So, college football players are not the only ones whose "ability to remain on the job depends on a factor having nothing to do with his or her job performance".

For lawyers the "law" is even worse.

Here it is, once again: