MAGA Has Learned It’s Better to Misread the Law Than to Change It
How They Do It—and How to Stop It
It’s striking to watch how the Republican strategy has evolved. Once the project was about rewriting laws—amending statutes, passing new restrictions, reshaping the code itself. That was slow, public, and often unpopular.
Now the smarter play is to misread. Why bother changing the text when you can twist the meaning? Why fight for new statutes when you can weaponize old ones with a fresh “interpretation”?
So the mantra becomes: we will follow the law. And the trick is in the reading.
By leaning into selective, often willful interpretations, they can advance policy while claiming neutrality. It isn’t rebellion... it’s obedience, at least on paper. And in today’s environment, obedience on paper is enough.
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From Changing the Law to Misreading It
For decades, courts—especially lower federal courts—were able to issue sweeping injunctions that froze controversial policies in their tracks. That power has been steadily eroded. Nationwide injunctions are harder to secure. Judges know that if they move too aggressively, the Supreme Court will step in.
And with a Supreme Court majority reliably aligned, the ultimate check is already spoken for.
This creates a peculiar kind of freedom: push as far as you like, because the worst outcome is a slow-motion reversal years later.
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Misreading Without Punishment
Here’s the asymmetry. A bad faith interpretation of the law carries no cost:
If it holds, you reshape policy in your image.
If it fails, you’ve still shifted the ground, created facts, and harvested political capital.
Either way, you can point back to your opening defense: we were just following the law.
There is no meaningful penalty for misreading. Only upside.
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When Law Becomes Costume
This is the deeper point: when enforcement of the law depends on good faith, and the institutions charged with enforcing it are aligned with the misreader, law stops being constraint. It becomes costume.
The words remain... the procedures remain... but the binding quality is gone.
What’s left is politics draped in legalese, where the ritual of citing statutes or precedents is more about narrative positioning than about actual limits.
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Exposing the Misread
At first glance, “I’ll follow the law” seems like the end of the argument. Who could object to fidelity to law? But it’s exactly here that the fight must take place.
The confrontation isn’t about the promise—it’s about the definition. What law? Whose reading? On what authority?
The answer is simple: show me your law.
Outline the statute. Show the precedent. Walk me through the steps of reasoning. Don’t just declare obedience... demonstrate it.
Because once the interpretation is dragged into daylight, it becomes clear how thin it often is. Gross distortions, selective quotations, and leaps of logic can survive in soundbites... but not when laid out step by step.
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Case Studies of “Following the Law”
We’ve already seen this script play out:
Kash Patel’s FBI Confirmation
Trump’s nominee to lead the FBI reassured senators by repeating “I will follow the law.” Yet he refused to commit to resigning if ordered to act unethically or unconstitutionally. Fidelity to law was the costume... the threat to independence was the substance.
Roe as “Settled Law”
Conservative nominees told Congress that Roe v. Wade was “settled law.” Justice Kavanaugh even stressed it had been reaffirmed many times. Then, once seated, they dismantled it. The promise to respect precedent was only cover for its destruction.
The Major Questions Doctrine
A newly minted “doctrine” claimed fidelity to statutory limits while gutting Biden’s student loan relief. But when similar questions touched Trump’s agenda, the doctrine was conveniently absent. The law hadn’t changed—only the reading.
Each of these examples follows the same pattern: the oath to follow the law, the misread that serves partisan ends, and the slow exposure of bad faith.
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Why This Approach Works
1. It Shifts the Burden
Instead of defending against the shield of “law,” you demand they justify it. That reverses the power dynamic.
2. It Exposes the Bad Faith
A misreading can hide in rhetoric, but not in plain text. When the words don’t match the reading, the game is visible to everyone watching.
3. It Reconnects Legality to Legitimacy
The public begins to see that the law isn’t neutral scripture; it’s subject to interpretation. And once interpretation is revealed as partisan maneuver, the legitimacy of the claim collapses.
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Punishing the Misread
But exposure isn’t enough. A misreading of law, once revealed, still needs consequence. Otherwise the incentives remain the same: distort, delay, harvest the political upside.
And we actually have a record of consequence. After the 2020 election, the lawyers who filed bad faith suits to overturn the result weren’t shielded forever. Many were sanctioned. Some were disbarred. Courts made clear that even in politics, you cannot march into a courtroom armed with distortions and lies without risking your license.
The same happened outside the courtroom. Lies about voting machines didn’t just vanish into the ether. They led to billion-dollar defamation settlements, gutting the outlets that carried them. The message was simple: bad faith has a price when it crosses into the professional or corporate realm. There is hope in that precedent. It shows that punishment is possible—and that when it comes, it stings.
Some of it is institutional. Courts can sanction attorneys and officials for filings that twist statutes beyond recognition. Legislatures can haul agency heads into hearings and force them to defend their reasoning under oath. Independent offices can issue binding guidance that cuts off bad faith before it metastasizes.
But punishment is also political. A distorted reading only survives if it hides behind complexity. Dragged into the open, it becomes legible. That’s where reputational cost kicks in. Make the distortion obvious enough and it sticks—not as clever lawyering but as cheating.
And then there’s legitimacy. A government action can be technically lawful and yet democratically illegitimate. That gap is where political punishment lives: in the media narrative, in professional shame within the legal field, in the electoral arena where voters learn to equate “I followed the law” with “I abused it.”
The punishment isn’t jail time or fines. It’s exposure with teeth. It’s stripping away the costume and making sure everyone sees the bad reading for what it is... and then holding it against those who advanced it.
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The Authoritarian Parallel
There’s a darker model for this kind of governance, and we don’t have to look far. This is how China works.
China has laws—plenty of them. On paper, it has constitutions, statutes, codes, regulations. But every law is subject to one higher law: the needs of the Party. Interpretation isn’t about text or precedent; it’s about alignment. The law is what the Party says it is, when it says it, for as long as it says it.
That is the endgame of misreading. You don’t need to erase statutes or stage dramatic rewrites. You just bend the meaning until the words are costumes and the only reality left is raw political power.
And here’s the final lesson: the endgame is where we all learn, as they already have in China... the law says the Party is right.
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The Endgame of Misreading
If we never attach consequence, the game only accelerates. Law becomes nothing more than a prop, an empty script delivered with straight face while power is exercised without limit.
But when lawyers are disbarred, when networks are bankrupted, when reputations collapse, it shows that bad faith isn’t invincible. It can be punished. And when it is, the deterrent is real.
A democracy cannot survive on costume alone. At some point, the audience stops pretending. They stop believing the play. And when that happens, the risk isn’t just that law collapses—it’s that legitimacy collapses with it.
That’s the choice before us: expose and punish bad readings now... or accept a politics where “I followed the law” means nothing at all.