You don’t win an oral argument by painting a picture of reality that the judges don’t recognize. It’s an even worse idea to tell them to just blindly trust the judgments of others in deciding what the law is. That’s what government lawyer Michael Dreeben tried on Thursday in the Supreme Court argument over presidential immunity in Trump v. United States. Dreeben, a veteran advocate who has made more than 100 Supreme Court arguments, unaccountably acted as if he’d forgotten that he was arguing before a Court that believes in the rule of law — not the rule of lawyers.
