Opinion | Would this conservative Superlawyer bend before Trump?

When I recently read that the Gibson law firm had withdrawn from the trump administration of the trump administration because of its mass deportation policy because I feared that it would become dinner at a judicial conference in the President in the late spring.

My dinner was Theodore Olson, the well -known lawyer in Washington, who represented George W. Bush in the decisive Supreme Court against Florida's votes in the 2000 elections. After working as a attorney in general in Mr. Bush's first term in office, he returned to his legal practice. His company was Gibson Dunn.

Days before dinner, Mr. Olson and his opponent in the election of 2000, David Boies, announced that on behalf of two gays, they sued the State of California on behalf of the prohibition of same -sex marriage imposed on proposition 8, which approved the voters of the state last November.

Mr. Boies, a liberal, was a free agent, the founder of the law firm who bore his name. Mr. Olson was different, a founding member of the fields of the field Society, a Republican insider who embodied the great right. The lawsuit pulled fire both left and right. The supporters of LGBTQ rights were intensely suspicious of the motives of Mr. Olson and the opportunities of the lawsuit after they had tried to promote political support for same-sex marriage for years and at the same time to keep the problem away from the courts that they considered hostile. A report on the submission of the lawsuit in the Times described the two lawyers as “in the spotlight grabbing, but otherwise not tested players in the blue spot by proposition 8”

I was fascinated and now by chance Mr. Olson, an elbow was removed. Why are you doing this? I asked him. What is the story? His answer removed any doubt that I had about his sincerity or commitment to his customers. He believed in marriage, he said. (I knew that his third wife, Barbara Olson, died in one of the kidnapped aircraft on September 11 and had recently married for the fourth time.) He had gay friends and saw no reason why the law prevented her from marrying people with whom they wanted to spend their lives. Someone would make such a lawsuit, he stated, and someone could just as well be with their resources and lifespan of their knowledge, as the federal courts worked. He believed that he had a prize.

His death in November at the age of 84, after suffering a stroke, meant that he did not live to see how quickly the blackmail of a Republican President could once reduce disruptive law firms to conditional suppliers for the grace of the president. When the series capitulations were deployed, the companies promised to give the time of the lawyers worth millions of dollars for the president's favorite cause for the further access to the federal government for themselves and their clients, I often thought of Mr. Olson and how he may have reacted. I know that my instinct that he would have knocked down hard is presumptuous; No more than the rest of us, he could not have imagined what developed, let alone an anticipatory reaction to the unthinkable.